We enable you to accelerate delivery of your current IT operating cost reduction target in less than half the time you currently envisage

Q. How can the City-IT Smart Spend service help make you be more successful?
A. We can reduce key IT spending categories by 13-40% within your financial year

City-IT Smart Spend

Do your colleagues particularly in Finance ask you difficult questions over why it takes so much time, effort and investment to make significant performance improvements in IT cost effectiveness? Traditionally major financial institutions have turned to global, multi-billion dollar technology firms for advice on IT strategy and cost strategy. It should not be surprising that these firms typically advise you to take on huge enterprise level IT projects costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. These programmes take a long time to implement and even longer for you to see the promised investment returns. This approach is difficult to justify to your CFO, board and investors during the intense pressure to preserve capital during the 'credit crunch'. Perhaps, it's now time to consider alternative approach.

If you need to accelerate the pace of your IT cost reduction programme to deliver significant savings within 6-12 months, we can help you realise significant savings by focusing on the 3 key sustainable IT cost reduction strategies that can deliver the most rapid results. These strategies are: IT Project and Investment portfolio optimisation, sourcing and procurement optimisation and labour productivity optimisation (incorporating offshoring and outsourcing).

Purpose of the IT Smart Spend service

We help you accelerate your IT cost reduction programme (more savings in less than half the time) with strategies that can be implemented fully within 6-12 months while delivering significantly higher savings within your current budget year. All while reducing your execution risk dramatically.

Results & key benefits

We will help you reduce external spend by 13% on external products and services (above and beyond unit cost reductions already factored into your existing contracts).

Reduce operating costs by 25-65% through more aggressive use of outsourcing without sacrificing service quality.

Reduce operating costs of key IT functions by 20-30% by more extensive use of outsourcing without being held to ransom by your outsourcing partner rolling back savings through 'gaming' change requests.

Optimise your IT project portfolio to reduce spending by 25% while significantly increasing the financial benefits delivered to the business and cost reductions within IT budgets.

City-Smart Spend - How does it work?

Step 1 – Information harvest – “seek first to understand” (Steven Covey – '7 Principles')
Our initial step is to gather together the critical information, data and insights on the status of your key IT spend categories. We do this through structured interviews with the key stakeholders, managers and staff involved in the key IT spend categories. We put together a current financial baseline, comparisons with competitor IT cost benchmarks, high-level descriptions of your business & IT architecture (constructing a Technology Value Framework, Application Value Framework and High-Level process architecture), a 'Level 0' IT portfolio/ investment value analysis) and review your IT costing and chargeback mechanisms.

Step 2 – Opportunity scan
We take the critical information gathered in Step 1 and map this information against our cost reduction framework and toolset. We can then give you:

1. Sourcing opportunity shortlist.
2. IT project optimisation proposals.
3. Extended offshoring opportunity assessment.
4. Outsourcing opportunity assessment.
5. An assessment of the key stakeholder buy-in to cost reduction and service improvement opportunities.
6. Our expert, independent perspective on how robust your IT cost management, chargeback & governance disciplines are and answering your concerns as to whether they are fit for purpose.
7. And finally our perspective on the financial and business impact of your existing cost reduction initiatives.

Our overriding objective is to give you this expert diagnosis quickly so that you can determine the additional cost reduction opportunities available to you and the risk profile for these initiatives.

Step 3 – Prioritise key opportunities
We work with you to define a structured programme of IT cost reduction initiatives across 30, 90 and 180 day timeframes. Our experience is that we can put together a revised programme with you that accelerates your current planned savings target for 360 days two to three fold, significantly reduces your execution risk and increases your overall cost reduction delivery by 50-100%.

Step 4 – Action Plan implementation
Finally, we help you strengthen your programme execution capability and work shoulder-to-shoulder with you in realising the benefits from your initial 30 and 90 day execution plans..

Are you ready to start resolving your difficult challenges?

We are confident through our IT Smart Spend service that you can enjoy significant cost reductions within your key IT budgets this financial year. Our work with you is backed by our no-quibble, guarantee – “no fees unless you are completely satisfied.”

Read our CASE STUDIES that illustrate actual results our clients have enjoyed.

If you would like to discuss your particular situation and challenges and how our 'IT Smart Spend' service can work for you then please feel free to call now for a 'no obligation' initial discussion. You can reach me, John Corr, on Tel: 020 7748 2225 or email me at john.corr@cityprocessmanagement.com.