Article at a glance:

Fighting complexity in IT

Largely to improve current earnings, companies are now taking an ax to IT spending. A few of them, however, view the reduction of IT costs as an opportunity to tidy up their act. Rather than deciding what IT they can or can't live without today—continuing to manage IT as they always have while merely managing less of it—they are changing their business activities and IT processes to eliminate the deeper-rooted causes of IT spending.

The take-away

Companies can do more than just lower their costs if they attack the deeper causes of soaring IT expenditures by streamlining the tangle of uncoordinated systems that many of them installed during the heady late 1990s. Where possible, they should coordinate their IT systems so that these systems no longer support only one channel or portfolio as well as consolidate their database-management and other infrastructure technologies, redraw their IT architectures, and exploit new outsourcing opportunities.