Ensuring your capacity to act

On account of today’s difficult market situation for financial service providers, the issue of IT costs became a priority of IT management. IT departments face a higher pressure to justify expenditure towards functional divisions. In parallel, there is a rising pressure to reduce spending on information technology. Through proactive action by IT managers in the institutions, the IT department positions itself as a supportive partner of its internal customers.

The financial services industry is particularly penetrated by, and highly dependent on, information technology. When difficult market situations arise, enterprises regularly adopt programmes to reduce costs that also demand substantial savings from IT units — after all IT expenditure accounts for a significant share of bank budgets due to the high penetration rate. Apart from searching for short-term optimisation potentials for project and investment costs, re-negotiating provider contracts or issuing new invitations to tender for such contracts and optimising internal IT costs, the relevance of the issues of cost transparency and cost control rises more and more. In this context, the question of cost transparency is raised by functional divisions: “What do I get for my money?”

zeb/cost.management covers both measures to change the course once in challenging situations and measures designed to stay on track in the long term:

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Short-time optimisation is based on creating transparency of the IT cost situation. Here, a multidimensional perspective is selected in order to identify institution-specific cost drivers and to avoid indiscriminate cost-cutting requirements that could endanger the long-term capacity of IT units to act by taking a traceable view of processes and IT products. On the basis of the cost drivers identified, possible fields for action are highlighted and prioritised. Proposed measures and evaluations of potentials are discussed with the competent persons and prepared for decision-making in action profiles.
To make the step from merely reacting to targeted action and control, the next project phase focuses on establishing sustainable cost management. Based on the individual status quo, the requirements for an advanced tool set are investigated and a tailored solution is designed that integrates seamlessly into the overall IT control and reporting instruments (e.g. multidimensional KPI reporting).

zeb/cost.management enables IT managers to act with foresight in order to avoid the disadvantages of indiscriminate cost cutting for reducing costs in the short term and, at the same time, make a proactive contribution to ensuring the entire enterprise’s capacity to act.
The long-term optimisation of cost control provides the basis for achieving cost and performance transparency and thereby improves not only the foundation for taking management decisions, but also the argumentation base in relations to functional divisions.