Expert IT Leadership Blogs

Hard costs for IT functions are simple for enterprises to understand, track, and manage. There's much less visibility into reducing “soft costs,” which represents an effective approach for enterprises to understand risk, streamline processes, and continuously improve.

Understanding your technology-related hard costs for servers, networking, storage, and software is trivial. But what about your soft costs, which impact your total cost of ownership (TCO) just as significantly? It's difficult to create a precise accounting for soft costs because they are a challenge simply to recognize, much less track and analyze.

These soft costs are real and substantial and can kill your bottom line. However, this challenge provides a business opportunity: savvy organizations that can effectively understand their soft costs can also reduce them and gain a competitive advantage.

What are some of the IT soft costs impacting your TCO?

• Planning & designing systems. Before you spend a single dollar on hard costs for new equipment and technologies, it's likely you've already spent significantly just planning for change. Planning and designing processes are a soft cost investment that can be difficult to quantify objectively.
• Monitoring. Even when nothing is going wrong, a soft cost is required simply to know for certain that nothing is going wrong. You need to have deep operational visibility to capture the true resource costs for monitoring.
• Maintenance & mitigation. Basic repair processes and event response consume time and organizational energy that can be difficult to assign hard costs to, especially when routine functions are accomplished manually. Do you know what you're spending to have appropriate resources available 24/7?
• Training. It's not just about training up as part of the onboarding process for new hires. Training is required when new systems are added for compliance purposes, to manage risk, and more. Training costs are overwhelmingly measured in time, and thus difficult to quantify.
• Migrations. Many cost analyses for a migration project begin and end with hard costs. However, it's the soft costs that can really add up. If you're attempting to manage the process in-house, soft costs incurred are your workers' time and the opportunity cost of diverting them from core business operations. Time spent training to use new technologies is part of the equation and downtime risks are another variable.
• Lost Opportunities. Speaking of opportunity costs, they are not a process but rather the inevitable consequence of IT functions that are misunderstood or misaligned with business goals. Unexpected or runaway IT soft costs don't just eat into a company's bottom line; they prevent the benefits that would accrue from better, more informed spending decisions.
• Lost Functionalities. Also not a process but a variety of opportunity cost that measures the organizational diminishment that occurs in an environment of insufficient IT resources. Organizations that lack the capability to understand their IT resource needs and incur unnecessary IT soft costs miss out on more valuable IT investment opportunities and invariably suffer from insufficiencies that negatively impact productivity and operations.

It's essential to capture soft costs to gain a complete understanding of TCO for your IT environment. However, companies are still challenged by the difficulty of gaining a real understanding. Now, a solution makes sense of the problem: introducing Workscope.

Workscope can help you understand & reduce your IT soft costs

The initial goal is to understand your IT soft costs, which produces a data framework to define the scope. The follow-up goal is to have a solution that generates actionable insights from that data, allowing you to make better, more confident decisions to reduce soft costs.

Workscope is designed to leverage your data to generate more business value for your IT systems. Gain a complete understanding of where your soft costs originate and what they are, and then receive recommendations that can reduce them while simultaneously making your IT systems more efficient, less exposed to risk, and better supporting continuous improvement.

Workscope integrates multiple proficiencies within a single, cost-effective solution, including process automation and workflow improvements to achieve your security and business objectives. Pricing is flexible, affordable, and based on your organization's size and the performance needed.

Don't remain in the dark about your IT soft costs. Contact our team today and let's discuss your technology environment. We can innovate solutions to gain control of your soft costs, reduce your technology TCO, and protect your bottom line from becoming a victim of the Silent Killer.

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