Operations or Investment? Or Both? 5 Essential Tips to Balance IT Spending

IT budgets have historically been heavily weighted on the operations side, making sure core systems stay up and running, while innovation was something to fund later. But now, with the pace of technology accelerating, more organizations are shifting that approach and dedicating a larger portion of their budgets to strategic innovation. Are you?

The concept here is to reinvest savings created through efficiency improvements, such as cloud migration and automation, into AI and digital transformation and the development of new business capabilities.

If you are currently working through this for your company, you know how challenging it can be. It depends on making data-driven investment decisions that tightly align your IT spending with corporate business objectives. It also requires reorienting your own mindset, regarding IT as a key player in promoting growth rather than a cost center.

To arm you with some deeper insights, here are some strategies that are being used by companies to strike a solid balance between ops and innovation:

• Set aside funding for growth: Begin the move away from budgeting solely for day-to-day operations and begin allocating a growing portion of your IT budget to innovation and future-focused initiatives.
• Tie spending to strategy: Make sure every IT investment demonstrates a clear return on investment and supports broader business priorities and outcomes.
• Begin to redefine the role of IT: This takes time and a commitment to begin recognizing your valuable IT technology as a driver of value and growth rather than simply an expense to be managed.
• Collaborate across the business: Teamwork wins! Seek to bring your C-level management together with your team to improve alignment and shared ownership of all key projects.
• Use efficiency to free up funds: Leverage cloud platforms, automation, and AI to reduce operating costs. Make sure you are using all tools available to lower your bills and optimize your contracts with suppliers and providers.

Pay close attention to item #5 above, because it may be the most important. Companies that are not running a tight ship when it comes to evaluating all areas of their businesses for savings opportunities will pay downstream in the form of insufficient funding to innovate. That puts them behind the curve with systems that quickly become obsolete and an inability to attract the best talent to run their companies.

This is especially true for IT departments. And that’s where we can help.

Our WinBill® TEM (Telecom Expense Management) solution will help ensure that you are never the victim of billing errors and other anomalies from your providers and suppliers. And these errors are much more common than you think. They’re also expensive.

Using WinBill® will identify and flag invoices that otherwise may have slipped through the cracks, paid over and over again without sufficient vetting. But don’t neglect to perform regular IT/telecom audits, which can shave serious savings off your annual IT/telecom spend. Our clients have reported annual savings in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved using telecom expense management and regular professional audits.

The need to put greater funding focus on bringing innovation into your company will require planning, organization and a new, more aggressive strategy. We’re prepared to help you get there. We talk with IT professionals like yourself every day. That gives us a lot of time-tested experience under our belts.

Give us a shout. We’ll be happy to answer your questions and share the results our customers have achieved by using our WinBill® and our Deep Dive Forensic audit. But don’t wait until the new year is half over. We’re here to help you start now!