IT Leaders Lack Skills For The Most Important Cost-Reduction Activities

What cost-reduction activities are important to IT? And how mature are IT leaders at performing those activities? We posed these questions in a survey to 56 senior IT people. The results? Process redesign and project management were the most important but are strongly in need of improvement. Financial management and planning were somewhat less important but more mature. And human resources (HR) practices were the only activities where maturity was rated higher than the importance. Follow-on discussions uncovered that the most important cost-reduction activities have changed. Cost reduction within a single organization has been done for a while — now the focus is the entire enterprise. Therefore, process design, project management, enterprise architecture, and vendor management must operate globally. Many are ill-equipped to deal with the politics and complexity of decisions that cross geographic and business unit boundaries.