Today, businesses need to do more, faster and for less.
But the relentless growth of data, coupled with declining budgets, makes this complicated, said David Merrill, chief economist at Hitachi Data Systems.
Merrill discussed the rands and cents involved in IT maximisation at the Hitachi Information Forum in Johannesburg this week. He said the best way to convert technical benefits into business benefits is to show management the money.
"As an economist, I relate everything I talk about back to money," he said. "Translating capacity, storage and big data problems into monetary problems will help business people better understand IT concerns because management understands money."
To successfully reduce IT spend, IT professionals need to measure the unit cost of different technologies and processes and then communicate these unit costs to management. For Merrill, the notion that buying cheaper products or upping prices will counteract increases in costs is a fallacy, stressing that companies need to go back to basics should they wish to successfully reduce IT spend.
Monitoring and tracking processes, troubleshooting systems and retiring old devices will reduce costs, said Merrill. Virtualisation is the single best thing a business can do to reduce the cost of a terabyte, he added.
Another way to reduce costs is to change business behaviour, which starts with better utilising what the business has at its disposal, he said. The final cost reduction strategy, he suggested, involved the business changing its ideas about ownership and IT depreciation, which forces businesses to keep assets for longer than they need to.
"Maximising efficiency and maximising IT performance is engrained in maximising economics. Measurable gains can be achieved through clever IT economics," concluded Merrill.
"We have seen many trends around how businesses can cut IT costs. Some of them are behavioural, some of them are radical, some of them are political, some are technical, but they all prove that it is possible to reduce unit costs."
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