According to this CIO.com article, you are all carrying 40% greater costs in your departmental budgets than you need to. Time to break out the long knives.

The thing about this is that while I find myself one of the more militant advocates of cost-cutting in organizations I work with, it's a rare, rare case where I find 40 percent cruft in their IT budget. And generally I get called in to organizations which are genuinely in some sort of crisis, where budgets are likely to be further out of kilter than in businesses which are being managed by a competent CIO already. I have a lot of trouble crediting the numbers cited in the Hackett Group study, or their responsible application in the recommendations of the CIO article.

Moreover, while the Hackett group study recognizes the difficultly of performing rapid analysis and making decisions on cuts in a timeframe short enough to be beneficial in a downturn, I question whether or not the current environment really presents that sort of scenario. How long have you been hearing "recession" on the nightly news now? And anyone who closely tracks financial markets, as CIOs should, has seen potential problems coming for a year or more now. If you haven't been planning for what you might do in a downturn for most of that time, you're probably not the sort who looks at Hackett studies, anyway.

If you can get past the rather alarmist numbers, the suggestions in the report are all good and represent best practice, if perhaps not going as far as I might in similar circumstances. Considering the environment, if I was helming an IT organization faced with genuine and dramatic requirements to cut costs, I would consider a top to bottom restructure, getting rid of many of the legacy systems and practices that are so costly to daily operations. CIOs who have already built departments in a more modern mold, using extensive outsourced services and other on-demand solutions, have a much easier time dialing their expenditures up and down than more traditional IT operations.