To cope with a tightening economic environment, businesses should prepare now for cutting IT costs, and the data management discipline is one area that affords numerous opportunities for reducing and controlling costs, according to Gartner.

Gartner identified nine key areas in which CIOs can significantly reduce costs during 2008 as they continue to support data management and integration-related initiatives:

Perform Operational Database Consolidation — Through consolidation of redundant databases and database workloads, organisations have the opportunity to positively impact costs.

Optimise Data Integration Tools Licensing — Through consolidation of overlapping and redundant tools, organisations can reduce software license and maintenance costs associated with data integration tools, while also enabling a lower investment in acquiring and maintaining the skills to operate the tools.

Leverage Established Data Structures and Data Integration Process —By forcing project teams to prove they cannot leverage established artifacts before endeavouring to create new ones, organisations can significantly reduce the costs of implementation efforts by dramatically increasing levels of reuse.

Perform Data Mart Consolidation — Consolidating siloed data marts into a single data warehouse or into a smaller set of marts, delivers the same types of benefits as operational database consolidation, but also reduces cost and complexity of the data integration processes feeding the marts.

Enforce Standards to Foster Reuse and Agility — Gartner sees a significant trend toward organisations enforcing corporate standards for the use of tools (database management systems, data integration and data quality tools), schema design, naming conventions and various other dimensions of data management, which increases the ability of teams to collaborate and increases agility by enabling easier re-allocation of personnel across teams.

Defer Replacement of Custom-Coded Architectures — The effort required to migrate away from custom code can be a significant expense on top of the software licensing costs of the tools themselves. Organisations can potentially defer these migrations if custom coded processes are meeting business needs and working appropriately today.

Explore Open Source Licensing —Organisations continue to seek ways to reduce these costs, and increasingly look toward alternative models for software licensing, including open source licensing in which software users incur no upfront licensing costs at all.
Renegotiate Services Contracts —IT contracts with tactical deliverables should bundle planning and design services as a part of a single comprehensive implementation service, as compared with separate services contracts.

Defer Low-Priority/Limited Benefit Projects —In times when budgets are tightening, CIOs can assist in reducing IT spending by identifying and deferring to a later date those investments that have a low priority because of low potential return on investment.