You’ve already instituted a travel ban, relinquished the open head count and froze spending for the foreseeable future. These obvious tactics are being executed at companies everywhere in response to the growing fear of the ‘r’ word and all those other water cooler discussions related to cost cutting. You should actually be grateful – yes grateful – that you’ve been forced to push the pause button on your IT projects. Now you have an opportunity to evaluate your IT landscape and uncover lost money hidden within your enterprise applications. Below are seven potential ways to help thaw that frozen IT budget. 1. Focus on only three ‘must complete’ projects to meet end of year deadlines and strictly follow this rule. These projects must include demonstrable, tracked ROI at every stage of the rollout, long-term cost savings for the company -- not just IT, and the protection/preservation of existing IT investments. 2. Assess your assets: get a handle on your application inventory to find out what’s being used and what’s shelfware. You will likely be surprised by the hundreds of applications and multiple versions that could be consolidated or eliminated resulting in significant cost savings in licensing, network management and productivity. 3. Uncover your liabilities: while you’re taking a closer look at your current applications, it’s worth investigating what else has made its way into the infrastructure. While non-IT staff may be nimble at creating mashups, there is an inherent and costly risk with the proliferation of rogue applications – not to mention the impact of crapware and malware on the infrastructure. Consider aligning with human resources to institute a download policy. 4. Extend the life of your existing assets: modernize applications by extending them with new RIA composite applications that consolidate multiple legacy workflows into a new rich user experience over the web, but avoids costly re-writes. 5. Reduce operational costs: by modernizing legacy applications to web applications that eliminate on premise deployments and eliminate the need for costly virtualization software. 6. Renegotiate your licenses: take a closer look at what’s up for renewal (including SaaS licenses) and see if you can strike a longer-term agreement at a lower cost for those enterprise applications that are mission critical for the business. 7. Know what to outsource: improve your development team’s overall productivity and morale by keeping the most innovative, high visibility projects in house and outsourcing the monotonous and time consuming legacy modernization and reverse engineering to low cost services instead of your most expensive and valuable resources with institutional knowledge. Like finding lost money in an old coat, some careful planning and analysis can help CIOs weather the current IT budget storm. David McFarlane is COO of Nexaweb Technologies

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