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Managing during a downturn

Does it take caution or courage to manage through a downturn?

Tiger Woods and Accenture have been urging us business folks to “Be a Tiger” for a few years now, but when it comes down to the crunch, isn’t that easier said than done? I’d venture many managers would instinctively prefer to head for shelter than face a crisis head-on, but of course the actions executives take in situations like those (and times like these) are what distinguish leaders from followers. No doubt America’s new President would not have been taking the oath yesterday if he had avoided addressing the tough issues on the campaign trail.

“It takes courage to make the decisions that good economic times allow us to postpone,” says Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s head of North America and Japan, in a podcast posted today to the Cisco newsroom. In it, he reflects on the bold moves Cisco made in the downturns of 2001 and 2003 to become pioneers and then leaders in VoIP and Next Generation Networks.

This article got me thinking about the whole cost cutting articles I’ve been reading as well as those discussions I’ve been having with managers and colleagues in the industry.

Managing your IT, your business in a downturn is always a challenging activity and it differs between sectors, what works in an auction house, will be different to an investment bank, a real estate office. The commonalities are in reducing operating costs, in being more efficient with the infrastructure, the IT you have, whilst managing to deliver service or add value. There are a number of ways to do this, often it can come in the form of simply reducing costs, slashing budgets, stopping unnecessary investment etc. What’s often need is a number of things:

Consolidation of roles – can we consolidate applications/infrastructure roles on to fewer servers, do we need one or two applications per web server – could the DNS server not also be a print/file server?

Rationalization of systems – what range of business applications/tools are actually needed globally, and what business units/teams need what applications. Could the admin teams use OpenOffice or something similar rather than Word? Could we be smarter in the way we use the IT?

Virtualization and investment – by not spending what effect will it have on our operating costs, our data center space? By replacing the 7 year old servers with newer ones will we save any money through hardware support costs, gain capacity through more energy efficient systems? Could we spend a little money now and save real money in months? 

Inventory analysis – do we use the servers/desktops we actually have? How many idle systems are there sitting around the office either powered off or doing nothing? Could we decommission/recycle systems and be more efficient? How many of our systems are out of support and therefore going to contribute greater to our hardware/software support costs? Are we paying to support systems that either aren’t in use or do not need formal support?

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