Getting your IT department ready for 2009

...it reduces implementation costs and what you pay is predictable."

Green IT

From IBM and other blue chip tech companies through to Whitehall, every organisation began taking green tech seriously in 2008.

And it seems that the credit crunch will do little to diminish this commitment, with a recent survey survey of more than 1,000 companies by Forrester Research finding organisations are stepping up their investment in green tech .

Intellect's Ward said that green IT measures will be increasingly important amid the continuing economic downturn in 2009 because of the cost savings they can generate.

"There are some companies out there who have already implemented travel restrictions to save costs and so are looking for ways of communicating other than face-to-face.

"The cost saving solutions such as videoconferencing are the same that would be used for green IT, so I can see one accelerating the other," he said.

The Greening Government ICT report, a set of guidelines for reducing IT-related emissions in Whitehall, also recommends a range of measures including switching monitors to standby after five minutes of inactivity; automatically shutting down desktop computers outside working hours; reusing as much computer equipment as possible; reducing the numbers of printers used and setting default 'green' print modes such as duplex printing; and auditing datacentres and server use to make sure machines are running at maximum efficiency.

Get tough on outsourcers

Large financial institutions are renegotiating outsourcing deals as companies try to wring savings out of existing contracts.

But outsourcers are also predicted to enjoy a boom in new business as the drive to cut overheads triggers the outsourcing of IT and business processes.

Outsourcing advisory firm Equaterra believes some pretty aggressive stances will be taken, particularly by financial institutions seeking cheaper deals.

Analyst house Ovum is also predicting that in 2009 businesses are likely to demand faster returns on investment and greater efficiency from their outsourcing contracts - making 2009 a good time to take advantage of the rush to strike better terms on outsourcing deals.

Clean up your data

As organisations collect more information than ever and data regulators gain more powers, the cost of erroneous data in corporate systems has grown greatly.

Storage virtualisation, data deduplication and setting up a master database for information should all be at the top of CIOs' to do list.

Holding multiple copies of the same information can be costly and reduce efficiency when searching for information according to Quocirca's Longbottom.

"Most companies could lose about 50 per cent of the data inside the organisation," he noted.

"You are seeing that most companies are sitting on multiple data sets from multiple areas and that they have got dirty data.

"Customers are getting less happy about year-on-year getting four versions of the same communication from a vendor because they have got the same address under a different name each time.

"It looks bad for business because customers think if they have got that sort of thing wrong, what are the quality of their goods like."

He said that companies should undertake...