Enterprise IT controls less than half of enterprise IT spend. Many acquisition decisions are made in enterprise IT, funded by operations, and evaluated by executives. Sales and marketing, engineering, and product groups are a major part of the staff costs to operate and apply technologies to the enterprise. Repeated failures by enterprise IT has led to its fiefdom being cut. Now, large cuts will affect staff outside of IT with different risks.
For HR reasons many staff that perform IT work don’t have IT titles. Examples:
Business Analyst (analytics and running reports),
Quality Engineer (networking and data collection on the plant floor),
Call center specialist (scripts and marketing reports),
Executive committee assistant (collating reports and distributing packets),
Sales assistant (administering SFA/CRM), and
Individual contributor (keeping graphics workstations running in communications).
Problems to figure out:
Who’s really doing things that are tech that you can’t live without (op, regulatory, responsibility)
How to pay for those you need.
What will you do for your next staff reduction?
Possible solutions:
Dump it on enterprise IT – they might surprise you because they can combine functions or take over support.
Cut parts – job share, retire hire-back, fire-to-contract – will cut some.
Outsource – may be cheaper if ‘headcount’ matters
Do without – if you’re cutting, do you need more reports?
Possible traps:
A) You don’t know who’s doing the actual work needed (like domain or SSL renewals in marketing)
B) The responsibility to fix the plant floor is a product engineer not paid out of the plant budget
C) The administrivia to run an application is done part-time by a manager (like turning off/on users)
D) The advocate for the spend has moved on, and no one pays the support contract
E) Resource costs were buried in a ‘buy’ and now have to be separated
Coming up Next - How to hurt your organization by focusing on just 1 of these 7 traditional ways to cut headcount
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