There is great consistency in actions that companies use to reduce IT costs. But what are the actual savings, and how much effort does it take to realize them? To answer this question, Forrester compared the savings claimed from 22 consulting firms against the level of effort and savings realized by IT clients. What did we find? Large, distributed, and fragmented organizations with informal processes have greater potential for savings than smaller, highly centralized organizations with disciplined processes. Furthermore, the greater the effort put into cost reduction, the greater the savings. For example, large projects such as apps rationalization are complex and expensive but realized greater benefits than smaller ones such as renegotiating contracts with current vendors.