Simplify, Standardize, and Automate

Every organization has important budget challenges this fiscal year, and as a result, many IT leaders are being asked to do "more with less." That's a phrase that turns up whenever an organization experiences a budget shortfall. To reframe this phrase: it means "we don't have the resources to spend like we used to, but we are still expected to deliver on services to our customers." And every year, those services grow - just as the overall organization continues to grow. So IT is asked to do “more with less.”

An effective way to do "more with less" is to focus on what IT does best, and strive to do those things in the most efficient way possible. To do that, IT leaders need to simplify how they deliver those services. By simplifying a process, you make it easier to support, even as it grows.

Simplification is one component in the three-part general IT strategy:

1. Simplify
2. Standardize
3. Automate

Keeping things simple also IT to standardize those services, making them easier to support with limited staff time. For example: when I served as the campus CIO for a university, we consolidated personal website hosting services, from 5 web servers, to 1 server. This reduces the effort necessary to support personal web sites. It may not seem like much at first; supporting personal web site hosting may not take that much time, it's just "one more thing" in the day. But consider all the other things IT was also asked to do, and "one more thing" gets pretty big.

By sticking to those standards, we lower the total cost to maintain that service over the long term.

And for a simple service that has well-defined standards, it is easy to automate the administration of the service. That's less time to manage an individual thing, leaving the team more time to work on other tasks.

My vision with simplify, standardize, and automate is to allow organizations to streamline services, while continuing to build bigger systems, and support more of them. And that is what allows IT to do "more with less."