Nibbles:- How to cut back expenses 21st century style.

Spend less on PC's, mailroom and paper. Spend more on servers and storage. That's what everyone's doing, and it's showing in IT companies' results...

In the current economic climate most organizations will find it a no-brainer to change their desktop buying strategies to keep their old PC's for another year before replacing them. In fact many new PC's, which have a clock speed twice as fast as the your current office generation may actually run slower, because of power saving modes which can't be turned off without crashing everything, fatter operating system software and loads of ready to run multimedia options which you don't even use at work.

You can't avoid upgrading your servers. For many companies, their web site is how they communicate with customers and attract new ones. The faster the better. As you add on 2nd generation CRM software to analyse the effectiveness of those web transactions, you need faster servers and more storage.

The good news is that you can easily justify doubling your server budget by cutting back on more traditional and wasteful forms of communication. Your mailroom costs can be slashed because most communication can be by web and email instead of post and Fedex. Your marketing costs can also be slashed while getting better results. You don't need to send all those mailshots and print new color catalogs - ever again..

Remember the old days when offices used to have filing cabinets? Hire a skip and throw half of them away. You don't need what's in them. You do not have to file every magazine, mailshot, catalog or letter to keep your business in good shape. In another 6 months you can throw away most of the filing cabinets which are still left. If you have legacy paperwork which you need for legal reasons, digitise it or archive it.

Here's a rule of thumb...

If it's not already digital, it's probably not important. That saves you masses of floor space. You can cut down the number of floors you rent, hire more people or create more meeting rooms.

Plan to buy more storage systems. You know the sort of thing:- RAID, NAS jukeboxes, tape libraries. You're going to need a lot more of that then you think.

You may say that these ideas are a little extreme...

As a publisher, we switched from a paper based company to an electronic based company about 5 years ago. When we did paper, we used a lot. We also fuelled the old paper economy by selling zillions of mailing lists from our own and other publications to help vendors communicate with their markets.

Now, we don't even send mailshots to advertisers. They want to see what we offer? They come to our web site, and we communicate by email. End of paper. Good for trees and global warming.

Now you have to be a little bit suspicious of any born again evangelists, because your own situation may not be so extreme at either end. But if you're trying to understand why most IT company results today are showing that the PC market sucks, whereas the server market is expanding, and the storage business is exploding, it's because a lot of managers in a lot of organizations have been going through the thought processes above, and the pressure of a market slowdown will make a lot of this stuff change faster.

Another cost cutting measure when you're trying to recruit hard to get experienced people...

Recruit mice instead. You can pay them less. They take up less space, and they like working night shifts. But the best ones have already gone;-)