DSI cost reduction: a major issue

Today, the Information Systems Department is generally perceived as a cost center within companies. Massively adopted, originally, for the savings and the time saving it could generate, IT is granted an increasingly tight budget.

So much so that the role of Dsi Very often confines itself to the management of existing tools and their maintenance: innovation and the creation of value, meanwhile, are increasingly concealed. However, the DSI budget would benefit from being better used, by focusing on the supply of products and services to the various trades.

What levers to optimize IT DSI costs?

Faced with this new paradigm, it is essential to refocus the Cost management With a view to returning on investment (king), but also to depth certain internal practices.

Listen to the market

The purely technical CIO belongs to the past: the Director of Information Systems of tomorrow is a real businessman, resolutely oriented towards the trades. A new role that involves finding the right balance between cost optimization and value creation.

Attentive to market changes and listening to the marketing service, which knows the needs of customers better than anyone, the DSI seeks to Optimize IT processes and to assess the importance of the IT heritage of society in its daily functioning.

Thus, it can put the IT resources and organizational assets of the company at the service of the professions, in order to offer them products and services that perfectly meet their needs. In this way, it favors solutions which require little development and which are based as much as possible on configuration, which makes it possible to reduce costs.

Better frame the projects if

Better governance of projects is a powerful lever for control and cost optimization. To activate it, the CIO must in particular request a King study for all IT projects, upstream of their launch. The value of each of these projects must also be analyzed to establish priorities, based on different criteria: costs, benefits for trades, implementation difficulties …

In addition, it is essential to create and priced each new product with A diversified project teamcomposed of technicians, but also employees from trades. Indeed, the latter must take a higher part in the implementation of projects, in order to release the CIO of certain time -consuming tasks which prevent it from focusing on strategic subjects: among them, we can cite software management or user training.

The role of the CIO must therefore be well defined, by describing what it can do and what it cannot do. Awareness of business departments concerning IT costs can also be effective, by implementing, for example, an internal re -invoicing system.

Last point and not the least: sometimes you have to know how to give up. When a project is doomed to failure, it is better to end it and avoid waste of time and resources.

Have such a modular, flexible and scalable

The rapid deployment of new offers is only possible if the CIO is in a spirit of continuous improvement, with the possibility of changing its infrastructure quickly. A information system Flexible, flexible and reliable not only allows you to easily integrate new products or services, but also to adapt to new IT processes to be set up.

The agility of the IS goes through the optimization of the existing IT heritage, but also by the adoption of more efficient technologies. Automation, in particular, is an essential means for Optimize ISD costs. Concretely, it consists in entrusting with software for duty and time -consuming tasks, which allows employees to grant more time to value -creating missions.

Automation is therefore an effective solution to reduce costs, reduce the risk of human error and increase productivity, but it is not the only one: the generalization of the cloudof the Digital work environments and SaaS solutions also plays a key role.

Use the potential of the cloud

By equipped with SaaS software, the information systems management benefits from hosted and deployed applications from the Cloud. However, this is a powerful tool for Strategic IT costs management.

Indeed, a SaaS solution has different advantages compared to classic license software:

  • Its cost is generally lower.
  • The cost of the solution is not an investment (CAPEX), but an operating or operating expenditure (OPEX).
  • The software is updated continuously, without having to buy a license to benefit from the latest version.

Thus, the company no longer has to invest millions of euros varying, but it also achieves precious savings on the acquisition and maintenance of equipment. Indeed, the Implementation of a SaaS solution does not require the purchase of equipment or infrastructure: the software is immediately operational and easily accessible using a web browser.