This has been a difficult period of time for all of us, on both a business and personal level. The rising cost of fuel has impacted us all, and nearly every region of the county has faced some type of significant weather-related challenge in the past six months.

Now that the weather has improved and fuel prices have moderated some, people have been distracted by the recent Olympic Games in Beijing, as is probably evidenced by the amount of YouTube or NBCOlympics.com traffic your network has seen in the past two weeks. Throw in the ongoing credit crisis and the Democratic and Republican conventions to kick-off one of the most contested Presidential elections in decades, and it’s clear that the upheaval to the economy isn’t going to end immediately.

The Impact on IT Budgets

According to recent survey by InformationWeek, “of more than 600 business technology executives who responded to our most recent survey, 40% say they decreased IT spending this past quarter relative to their original 2008 budgets; for companies with annual revenue of more than $500 million, it's 50%.”

The survey indicates that budgets going forward this year are not likely to grow. In fact, a large percentage said they were expecting cutbacks. According to the article, “39% say they're cutting, and those cutbacks could be significant, with 19% saying their IT spending this year will be down more than 10%.”

What to Consider When Making Cuts

If you are faced with the unenviable task of reducing an IT budget that you already scrutinized before you submitted it, what are some things you should consider? According to Laurie M. Orlov of CIO, you should consider the future.

In her article, When Cutting IT Costs, Look to the Future, Ms. Orlov talks about some of the mistakes that were made following the dotcom bust and the Y2K spending hangover and suggests different tactics should be considered in the current economic downturn.

Here are three suggestions she offers:

• Protect hard-to-fill roles
• Bring on the interns
• Solicit ideas from your staff and peers

These work well for maintaining some of the human capital of the organization and maintaining a solid workforce, but it doesn’t begin to address the need to continuously maintain business services, keep corporate and personal data secure, and continue to meet a growing number of compliance mandates aimed at IT.

In the same issue of CIO, Mack Murrell, Dow Chemical’s vice president of IT, shares some ideas that begin to shed light on some technology decisions you can make to help in tight economic times like we’re in now.

Here are some of the key items Murrell shares:

• “We look at cost management from a strategic point of view. I’ve got a three-to-five year look ahead on costs.”
• Dow has controlled IT costs by maintaining an “appropriate” level of IT standardization
• IT customizes solutions only when necessary

One key, as the article states, is certainly standardization. In this case, the reference was to standardizing of hardware and applications. But, when you are standardizing your infrastructure, it is also important to standardize how they are configured.

Standardizing configurations ensures that your infrastructure will perform at its optimum potential and that critical business services will be available for both your external and internal customers. However, this requires the ability to know how you expect systems to be configured, can easily document how they are really configured, and what discrepancies exist between the two so that corrections can be made.

In addition, nearly every organization faces multiple internal and external audits of their IT infrastructure. A lot has changed since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley back in 2002. Audit firms have spent a great deal of time and effort over

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