The McKinsey view - managing IT spending in tough times

Good article from The McKinsey Quarterly (December 2008) discussing the fact that "businesses badly need to extract value from their IT functions".

This sounds like a real opportunity for proactive sales people.

The flavour of the article is about reducing IT spending which initially sounds threatening - but if we're in partnership with the IT manager, and being proactive, we can add genuine value which will build the relationship into the longer term.

From a Microsoft platform perspective, we should focus on the part of the article that states "improvements can be made with modest investments".  Part of the power of the Microsoft platform is that subsequent minimal investments in different parts of the stack can actually unlock huge ROI from existing software assets.  For example - simply adding a mobility solution can mean a field sales force can better utilise a Microsoft CRM investment - increasing sales, improving customer satisfaction, and reducing downtime and travel costs:  utilising Performance Point Server can tap into deep Business Intelligence functionality that ships with SQL Server 2008.  The list goes on.

But is there urgency?  I suspect if YOU'RE not proactive and your COMPETITOR is - then you might be the one that is targeted for the cost cutting...........