Why thinking beyond ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ might pay business dividends

By David Bicknell

Most organisations in the public sector are continuing to reduce their costs. 2012 brings a continued diet of re-asserting control of costs and delivering operational savings to cope with a challenging economic landscape.

But a conversation with York-based services and solutions company Trustmarque recently raised a new phrase, and one that is perhaps blindingly obvious, and which applies to both public and private sectors: cost avoidance.

As an IT organisation it is worth asking yourself whether you really need to purchase a product or service. Can you find an alternative strategy? If you don’t have to buy something, then don’t buy it. Or find a better way of spending the money to deliver structural change that benefits the business. 

Sometimes organisations miss an opportunity to bring their technology up to date and change the way they work. Their conservative approach never drives real change.

It is vendors like Trustmarque’s role to help such organisations plan, source, deploy and manage their IT infrastructure with an end goal of reducing their costs and delivering operational savings. In Trustmarque’s case, it is a highly successful approach which just led to the company’s best-ever year and won it the Services Provider of the Year title for 2011 in the CRN Channel Awards.

It is an approach that has also worked for its customers: Plymouth City Council, by upgrading to Windows 7, tackled change by creating a more flexible, mobile way of working – and saved itself £494,000 in licensing fees.

Sometimes you have to think big to win big. And thinking in terms of ‘cost avoidance’ rather than the cliche ‘reducing costs’  – though that doesn’t necessarily mean not spending at all – and going beyond an, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ approach just might help some realise their cost goals, and at the same time, change their organisations for the better.