For those of you that might have missed it, we took a cue from all of the negative economic news/talk of budget cuts, and added a panel on cost optimization (see link for slides).  Jim Duggan, Roy Schulte and I started off by highighting a framework to categorize cost savings based on who has the decision rights for a potential cost savings action and who would be impacted by it:

• IT Procuments – IT Leaders and their vendors own the decision rights
• IT Cost Optimization – IT Leaders own the decisions rights
• Joint IT/Business Cost Optimization – the decision is made jointly between IT and business leader
• Business Restructuing and Innovation – the decision is usually made by business leaders and IT leaders have little influence

The idea is to work on cost optimization opportunities at all layers, but to pay particular attention to the areas where you call the shots and can act fairly quickly rather than fixating on things that you have little control over.

This leads to the second framework that we brought up, which helps prioritize any cost optimizaiton idea within the above structure.  The idea is to focus on cost optimzation opportunities based on:

• Size of potential savings
• Time-to-Savings
• Cost-of-Savings
• Risk-of-Savings

This is the tip of the iceberg on an number of ideas.  You can see much more content on this at our site on IT and the Economy.