Given the uncertain economy, CIOs should be taking a hard, pre-emptive look at their processes, teams, and cost structures to identify areas for better cost and performance management, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB). The organization's program for CIOs, the CIO Executive Board, has published ten "prescriptions" -- critical actions -- for CIOs to respond decisively in an uncertain economy.

The ten recommended actions are drawn from a new CIO Executive Board online resource, the IT Cost Efficiency Diagnostic. It contains over 100 real-world tactics to help CIOs identify low-hanging fruit and to benchmark their cost savings efforts against peer organizations.

According to the CEB, these ideas are drawn from the real-world experience of leading CIOs, and contain pragmatic insight into what actually works within exemplar IT organizations.

1. It’s Not Just About Cost . Many CIOs are interpreting the current economic uncertainty as a mandate to cut costs. However, cost-cutting is only one side of the equation, as the performance mandate from business partners has just become more urgent. CIOs will have to parallel-process on both performance and cost efficiency initiatives. Our research also shows that the leadership behaviors that drive dual success are different in kind from what most CIOs possess -- only 1 in 10 CIOs can handle simultaneous “top priorities” of cost-cutting and business enablement.

2. Increase Business Engagement, But Free up Business Partner Time. Companies reporting the highest levels of IT-business engagement document that senior business partners spend almost 25% less time with IT than those at other companies. With that in mind, CIOs should explicitly halt initiatives that make IT overly bureaucratized, such as new chargeback schemes, extended business case reviews, and unnecessary business process standardization.

3. Protect the Growth Portfolio. Ensure that portfolio management processes do not undermine investments in architecture and business innovation that promise sustained strategic value. Our research shows that companies who excelled through the last downturn retained at least 5-7% of their IT spend against innovation projects.

4. Lock-in Management Skills and Business Knowledge. IT financial, negotiation, and communication skills, and business process knowledge are key “foundational” capabilities that are most at risk. Leading CIOs continue skill building initiatives for critical IT sub-segments. All the while they are seeking to selectively upskill their teams with top talent that has become available from other firms, even if it requires tough decisions about current staff.

5. Build a Cost Architecture. CIOs can seize the opportunity of the current economic burning platform to lower IT’s long-term cost base for politically difficult simplification, consolidation and externalization decisions given these will be more palatable right now. They should establish executive-committee consensus on IT cost-performance trade-offs up-front so that a clear CEO/CFO-mandated “cost architecture” is established for all subsequent tactical decisions on prioritization.

6. Kill Orphaned Initiatives. Just as some priorities go up in a downturn, others go down. Our research shows that in most organizations at this stage of the business cycle, up to 20% of total IT projects have lost sponsors. CIOs should search for these hidden sources of savings and do their partners and themselves some good by killing projects that are no longer at the top of the priority list.

7. Further Reduce Infrastructure Spend. Adopt new service management approaches that address tower-based operational inefficiencies by solving problems that cut across towers; our peer benchmarking shows organizations can realize up to 20% of their infrastructure spend in this fashion. Cut support costs and provisioning time 15-25% by managing the number of technology “combinations,” not the total number of technologies. Formalize a process to measure IT complexity and build business consensus on complexity reduction targets.

8. Drive Sustained Reduction in "Lights-On" Applications Spend. Manage demand for enhancements by cataloging requests using a small and consistent set of criteria; filter these requests through the retirement roadmap to cut maintenance costs by as much as 30%. Create maintenance SLAs based on strategic value and mission criticality to triage treatment of applications – determine which can be merely rust-proofed as opposed to retired. Finally, generate periodic application usage reports to negotiate metered licensing costs and inform maintenance resource allocation.

9. Pause Before Knee-Jerk Outsourcing. CIOs should put SWAT teams against root causes of operational inefficiency such as poor process design, metrics and documentation before the next wave of outsourcing agreements are completed, or your outsourcers will inherit your inefficiencies.

10. Take A Lightweight Approach to Process Standardization. Reduce effort by 20-30% on rolling out IT process standardization initiatives (e.g. ITIL, CMMi) by re-using documentation and tools already proven successful at other institutions, and understanding cost-benefit of progressing beyond certain maturity levels.

About the CEB's CIO Executive Board

The CEB's CIO Executive Board (www.cio.executiveboard.com) provides pragmatic and actionable best practices research, data, networking, executive education, benchmarking tools, and decision-support services to a global network of over 1,000 CIOs. Drawing on the power of the Corporate Executive Board’s cross-functional network from around the executive suite, the CIO Executive Board focuses on topics that are most critical for senior IT executives: IT-business engagement, IT governance and portfolio prioritization, innovation, value delivery, business process change, architecture strategy, lifecycle cost efficiency, risk management, and talent management.

The Corporate Executive Board Company (NASDAQ: EXBD) is a leading provider of best practices research and analysis focusing on corporate strategy, operations, and general management issues.

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