The economic headwinds for businesses are changing once again. Record-high inflation and resultant interest rate rises put business owners on the defensive, gradually shifting from the growth-first mindset into one of cost reductions.
Unfortunately, IT cost optimization strategies like reducing headcount are rarely a sure bet. Staff reductions don’t ensure cost optimization so much as they simply create more churn by hampering the customer experience. To ensure success, businesses have to look to a more holistic and maintainable solution for growth: IT cost optimization.
Recent surveys show that IT teams need intelligent automation to solve critical business needs. This way, 83% of IT leaders believe workflow automation is necessary for digital transformation, and 48% are currently installing automation solutions to automate manual tasks.
What Is IT Cost Optimization?
We are seeing a gradual shift in technology spending across the organization, becoming increasingly centralized under IT. This reality has put more emphasis on IT departments having a positive bottom-line impact on their institutions. IT cost optimization centers around achieving strong growth while reducing overall costs and creating more streamlined and effective processes.
IT teams are looking for new effective ways to automate recurring business operations and streamline critical revenue processes. The growing demand for automation shows that 36% of organizations already use business process management software to automate workflows, and 50% of IT leaders plan to automate more repetitive tasks within their organizations.
With the right data, companies enact a targeted approach, reducing waste or redundancies without removing vital functions. These must-have processes are performance-optimized instead, focusing on efficiency improvements that boost productivity for the long term.
Using intelligent automation solutions, 73% of IT leaders help employees save 10-50% of the time they previously spent on manual tasks.
Put It Forward enables this balanced approach by integrating with existing workflows and technology, creating automation, and unlocking the power of prediction to spur even greater improvements.
Why Is IT Cost Optimization Important?
Without this sort of cost optimization enabled by Put It Forward, companies lose out on a strategic approach to allocating resources. By putting the longer-term business focus at the heart of financial decisions, businesses enable a smart approach to spending that enhances resilience.
This can help with:
Embracing smart spending. Knowing the bottom-line impact of a spending decision ahead of time and calculating the expected ROI ensures purchasing decisions are always effective. With IT cost optimization, decision-makers ensure their focus remains on business improvements without needless overspending. Currently, 51% of businesses implement automation initiatives to boost efficiency.
Continuously reducing spend. New opportunities for cost reduction can be identified through IT cost optimization. Improved spending habits and patterns come into being with continuous review.
Optimizing existing spend. IT departments thrive on additional resources that improve their ability to meet a company’s needs. Once these purchases are made, IT cost optimization focuses on any additional improvements or streamlining efforts that can further reduce costs for added benefit.
Strategies of Effective IT Cost Optimization
Five key methods of IT infrastructure cost optimization have proven themselves effective at enabling smart spending. This criteria-driven approach involves:
- Connect projects with business objectives. IT has a crucial role to play in any digital transformation. Ensuring they have the resources to enact change without overallocating spending is key. Each goal must be applied to a specific project-based outcome to ensure spending is connected with intended outcomes.
- Enhance transparency throughout your mixed IT environment. Most organizations utilize cloud and on-premises data centers. Understanding which processes, services, or data sets are in which system, and how they’re connected, helps better gather information for optimization use.
- Understand costs. Some expenses, such as subscription services, have a standard set price per head. Understanding the admin, maintenance, and hardware costs that undergird operations can require more calculation, but defining cost structures for each component is essential to quantifying potential savings.
- Pinpoint inefficiencies. Seasonal fluctuations and other business changes can lead to resource over allocation. Forecasts don’t always align with the actual needed spending, in some cases. A full-scope review of costs across your business cycle makes these inefficiencies apparent and helps prepare for change.
- Distribute expenses by activity. Each business unit will have a cost based on its consumption, once you’ve reviewed your operations holistically. A top-level view of where spending is being allocated for business activities is crucial for oversight.
The Best Techniques of IT Cost Optimization
While every business is unique, time-tested areas of IT optimization lend themselves well to cost savings. Here are four of the top techniques to better allocate spending within IT:
Enhance financial transparency in IT. Working with financial staff allows teams to see the technical and related costs of a business service. This sort of transparency is essential in reducing overspend and ensuring proper allocation of resources.
Enable robotic process automation. Historical patterns and trends are major indicators of potential cost savings. With Put It Forward, businesses have access to best-in-class automation technology that streamlines the cost-saving process thanks to RPA.
Utilize workforce management. Virtual assistants can be used to lower staffing costs by taking care of simple or routine tasks. Business functions that can be automated should be, not only reduce spending but to enable existing staff members to focus on more important tasks.
Consider new transformation initiatives. Implementing an IT optimization like Put It Forward’s Intelligent Transformation platform is a perfect example of the kind of solution businesses need in a competitive climate. Open the floor to staff members and leadership teams to contribute their ideas for cost optimization as well.
How Intelligent Automation Impacts IT Cost Optimization
The major effect of a solution like Put It Forward’s Intelligent Transformation platform is in streamlining, improving, and advancing cost optimization more effectively. Manual efforts in IT cost optimization can require more resources than they end up saving, yet with intelligent automation business leaders can:
Lower labor expenses by automating tasks that staff members no longer have to spend time handling themselves. Put It Forward simplifies this process with data-led insights that have a real impact on growth.
Raise employee productivity through new opportunities for growth and enhanced support for regular responsibilities. With Put It Forward, specific instances of these kinds of opportunities are identified and applied to employee growth, leading to long-term results and simplified workflows for added productivity.
Lessen third-party reliance by building workflows and processes internally, utilizing an integrated Intelligent Automation solution. The ability to utilize a single productivity-boosting solution ensures costs are kept stable as reductions are identified and applied well into the future.
And, finally, eliminate data errors, which occur when human workers manually enter data. Automation negates this possibility by ensuring 100% accuracy for vital data functions.
Key Takeaways
With Put It Forward’s Intelligent Transformation platform, businesses can seamlessly integrate cost optimization within their existing workflows, creating a catalyst for growth and efficiency. This holistic approach transcends short-term fixes like staff reductions, which often have detrimental effects on customer satisfaction and operational efficacy.
Instead, businesses foster a culture of continuous improvement with the latest technology. Resources are allocated appropriately, inefficiencies are identified and rectified, and financial transparency is enhanced. The fusion of these elements not only mitigates the impact of economic uncertainty but also positions the organization favorably for future growth.
More than 80% of organizations already plan to increase their investment in automation solutions. To reap the full benefits of automation, get a robust work platform like – a low-code/no-code platform that aligns business and IT together to transform and simplify your business processes.
Whether it is automating processes, digitizing your operations, or managing requests, with the Put It Forward Intelligent Automation Platform, you can do it all within a unified platform. By applying the low-code/no-code platform, Put It Forward opens up development to everyone in the organization and dramatically accelerates digital transformation.
See how it works by getting in touch with Put It Forward today.
