Enterprise IT frugality is not just a choice anymore!

Businesses are neither invincible nor do they possess inexhaustible resources to propel growth. The reality is that enterprises are vulnerable to market fluctuations, and the recent economic roller-coaster has kept even seasoned leaders on edge.

The most pressing need for leaders is a fail-safe that can drive their business toward sustained growth. For this fail-safe to kick start, one must scrutinize IT operations to uncover and correct overlooked inefficiencies.

Inept infrastructure and processes can devour 60-70% of a company’s IT spend, leaving little room for growth and transformation. Low automation levels and redundancies across the workflow can tax enterprise resources significantly. These are reasons enough for IT leaders to ponder over their bloated operational bills with concern.

Does this story sound familiar?

If so, enterprise IT operations require not only a birds-eye view to gain clear visibility across the IT landscape but also a moth-eye view to identify hurdles that slow down organizations from achieving their digital priorities.

Set efficiency in motion with Pathfinder

Let’s face it, the problem statement is not new. Most IT leaders grapple with similar challenges day in and day out.

The real question is, how can enterprises identify the source of redundancies and inefficiencies? How to see beyond the obvious? How can one get clear visibility across all the components of enterprise IT? How can you spark a consistent growth mindset while maintaining the status quo?

Pathfinder helps to define a business-focused, continuous discipline to identify opportunities for achieving digital transformation by simplifying and rationalizing workflows across people, processes, and technologies.

It helps to create a highly efficient, practical, and optimal cost-spending framework, allowing your operations to modernize quickly. Pathfinder brings out opportunities to cut down the bloat and shadow costs to the tune of 15-20%.

Within this framework, even small-scale cost optimization projects can make a significant impact. Pathfinder uses a proven framework to eliminate, rationalize, standardize, and renegotiate your operational procedures and IT debt.

Furthermore, Pathfinder focuses on eliciting modernization options to drive 7-12% of cost savings in the medium to long term. By evaluating and optimizing ‘as-is’ IT operations and comparing against benchmarking data, Pathfinder creates heatmaps to enhance value output from platforms, delivery systems, business applications, and more. It shows the way to modernize the IT ecosystem, making them more efficient, productive, cost-effective, automated, and ready to power the next innovative move.

The Pathfinder framework helps to shed costs exactly where needed and enables re-investments that accelerate digital transformation. Here’s how:

1. Rapid cost-takedown through simplification: Focus on areas that drag – such as systemic redundancies, legacy IT, people-intensive processes, and stovepipes, all geared toward doing everyday things better. These are the first set of opportunities that help cost take-outs by simply doing things better.

2. Cost savings through optimization: Modern technologies (i.e., enterprise cloud infrastructure, line-of-business applications, etc.) provide significant benefits in allowing IT organizations to do more with less. By focusing on standardizing, simplifying, and rationalizing platforms, applications, processes, and services, and automating and digitalizing IT and business operations, organizations can direct their budget and people more toward growth elements.

Realigning people, processes, and technology

To drive short and medium-term impact, you can first reduce operating expenses through optimal resource utilization across the three core components of your business engine:

 1. People

Are you confident that you are utilizing your digital talent most effectively? Or can you do something different? Have you considered a multi-talent application approach? Sourcing talent from on-shore, near-shore, and off-shore locations helps reduce costs. By creating a blend of talent from different regions, you can overcome the hurdle of finding the right digital talent while lowering expenses.

 2. Process

Start by streamlining processes to standardize, automate, and remove duplicate workflows. This can eliminate repetitive tasks across various departments, enabling efficient automation implementation.

 3. Technology and data

If your business faces substantial expenses due to multiple systems running in data centers, consolidating the data centers or moving the infrastructure to the cloud can immediately save costs. You can also remove redundant servers and outdated infrastructure and shift them to the cloud.

What’s next?

Simplifying and optimizing is just the start. To avoid getting stuck between a rock-and-a-hard place, IT leaders must ensure a continuum that extends from your immediate to medium and long-term needs. You must simplify routine activities and rationalize spending to fund long-term innovation.

Consider these questions to activate long-term impact:

• Is your application modernized to match your business needs?
• Are there a lot of underutilized applications?
• Can you convert high-cost legacy applications into modernized, sustainable, and low-maintenance applications?
• Can you migrate your processes to the cloud and consolidate your data centers?
• How do you eliminate redundant servers? Or simplify your technology infrastructure and consolidate software licensing?
• How are you going to chart the course of your transformational roadmap?

Pathfinder can answer these questions for you. It is the GPS that outlines your transformational roadmap and propels growth.