IT Cost Reduction

Enterprise Architecture benefit #4

What is IT Cost Reduction?

IT Cost Reduction is the process of aligning the one-off and annual costs of your applications and IT infrastructure assets to a justified level because of the strategy and policies of the organization.

To be able to reduce IT Costs, you must be able to see where the cost-saving opportunities are.

Example Process Application Landscape that helps identify IT cost-saving opportunities in reusing applications more, deduplicating features, standardizing, and reducing complexity.

How Does Dragon1 Support IT Cost Reduction?

Dragon1 supports cost reduction by helping you create visualizations that show the costs made by the organization and where cost-saving opportunities are. To do that, you can visualize the benchmark cost, historical costs, future costs, and hidden costs.

Also, Dragon1 identifies for you seven areas where you can focus on saving costs to identify cost-savings opportunities:

Reduced Complexity
Reduced Pricing
Increased Efficiency
Increase Standardization
Monitoring Usage
Vendor Management
Web-Based Reporting

In all these areas, you can create diagrams and views on the Dragon1 platform that show the current and future state of how you could and should migrate. For instance, switch over to cheaper cloud providers or start using IT assets much more efficiently instead of buying new IT assets every month and start bargaining better with vendors and buy only what you need or pay only for what you use.

Nowadays, five areas are recognized that increase the complexity of the IT landscape of the organization and must be dealt with by any organization:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Bring Your Own Device
Wireless Networks
Mobile Devices

These areas make the IT landscape much more complex and also make it for people more difficult for IT professionals to do their jobs. Therefore, Dragon 1 helps you visualize the complexity in these five areas and how to reduce it. For instance, by using standardization, costs are lowered.

Often, people create a Process Application Landscape that shows exactly which applications are necessary, which could also be missed, or which applications are not used correctly or reused fully enough. Such a visualization helps to identify all kinds of IT cost-saving opportunities.

In organizations, many things happen where not everyone is constantly busy thinking: how necessary is this what we do about the strategy? When working with EA, every project unrelated to or necessary because of strategy gets the advice to be stopped. If you create a diagram that shows the relationship between objectives, goals, and IT assets and projects, you can often save IT costs and even prevent IT Costs (by stopping or redirecting projects).

Also, every process, service, system, or construction that does not add value to the business model or strategy should be stopped. This reduces complexity significantly and, with that, increases stability and overall quality. This, too, can be visualized by you: What are the complexity in the business processes and IT systems, and what IT costs can be saved when we reduce this complexity?

Rationalizing every solution based on benchmarks, standards, experience, and references will reduce costs. For this, you create on the Dragon1 platform a rationalization view.

More overviews and insights into dependencies and interrelationships ensure you will reduce costs.

Dragon1 supports you in realizing Cost Reduction by creating the following products: