Recession Information Technology

What should you as a business owner be doing with your Information Technology department and expenses in light of the current recession?  We believe there are four areas you should be focusing on today:

• Maximizing your value from existing investments while shedding unnecessary costs;
• Receiving maximum benefit from your third party vendors including full compliance with their contracted obligations;
• Safeguarding intellectual property including not losing the intellectual property of employees and/or third party vendors no longer associated with your company;
• Implementing strategic projects to refocus your Information Technology department on the new business realities.

Maximizing Value

It is important in these difficult times to make sure that you are getting the maximum value from you existing investments.  While much of IT represent sunk costs there are opportunities to both increase value and reduce costs.  Examples of the services we provide include:

• Reviewing your hardware and software maintenance contracts and advising on the desirability of renewing these contracts;
• Reviewing your technical infrastructure to identify opportunities for increasing performance without increasing costs;
• Working with you to identify the strengths and weakness of your current staff to assist you in deploying them to maximum benefit

Maximizing Third Party Benefits

Most companies have outsourced some of their Information Technology department's tasks.  This might be a third party web developer, and organization that maintains your infrastructure, or a development organization.  It is important that you are maximizing the benefits from these relationships.  We can assist with the following services:

• Reviewing contracts work performed for compliance with contract terms;
• Developing agendas and "score cards" to help you evaluate the ongoing performance of your vendors;
• Assist in renegotiating contracts if your needs have changed;
• Identifying additional vendors that may be able to provide needed services at reduced cost.

Safeguarding Intellectual Property

Your company's intellectual property has always been at risk of inadvertent loss.  However in these times of downsizing the risk of loss of intellectual property is greater than ever.  No only do you lose valued employees in a downsizing but without careful planning you can also lose intellectual property.  The memos, spreadsheets, email communications, and passwords on an employee's computer may represent a critical business resource that you can not afford to lose.  Frequently critical information can be held by one or two key individuals.  We can assist in your intellectual property protection as follows:

• Assisting you in identifying and safeguarding critical information that needs to be documented and safely stored to provide business continuity in the event of the loss of a key individual
• Providing remote backup strategies to safeguard intellectual properly on the computers of home and mobile workers;
• Establishing strategies, policies, procedures and hardware/software to archive computers that are removed from use in downsizing;

Implementing Strategic Projects

Recessions to not have to be all bad news.  Frequently changes in the business environment provide new opportunities.  These opportunities may require a revision of your Information Technology strategies and spending.  We can assist you with thinking thru these potential areas of opportunity from an IT prospective.  For example this may be an excellent time to consider implementing some "open source" solutions.  For more information on "open source" click here.