In tough times, investing in technology is smart use of money

By Monte Kendrick

The global economic downturn is forcing many companies to tighten their budgets. As a result, some executives take a negative view toward investing in their information technology infrastructure. However, such investments do not have to be expensive. In fact, the right approach may save money in the long run, regardless of the economic climate. Here are five ways companies can leverage technology to help weather hard times.

Strategy #1: Encourage telecommuting and teleconferencing

Management’s prevailing attitude toward telecommuting has often been one of skepticism. Many employers are hesitant to implement such a program out of fear — fear that the employee may not actually be working or fear that collaborative efforts will suffer. According to numerous studies, such fears are unfounded.

Allowing employees to work some of the time from home reduces transportation costs and on-site electricity usage. Employees who are allowed to telecommute often report having greater productivity, increased morale and longer work hours. While some functions cannot be performed remotely, many can as long as the technology supports.

Companies that are used to dealing with clients at their places of business can also try the remote approach. Audio teleconferencing can be implemented with very little investment, while videoconferencing may require only a modest investment. Extranets and VPN bridges can help link remote users to internal resources.

Strategy #2: Use open-source applications

Software upgrades, especially at the enterprise level, can quickly sap an IT budget. However, not all software requires payment of license fees. The open-source software movement has produced a number of excellent applications that have been used with great success.

The OpenOffice.org productivity suite is available for all platforms and provides nearly complete compatibility with Microsoft Office applications. Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird provide powerful and extensible Web browser and e-mail clients, respectively. To manage contacts, appointments and tasks, try eGroupware — an open-source groupware server available for practically every operating system.

Strategy #3: Invest in greener technologies

If your company is still using older hardware, it may be time for an upgrade. Not only will newer components bring improved performance and compatibility, they could save the company a great deal of money while helping the environment.

Over the past decade, manufacturers have continually improved power management and lowered energy consumption for most system components and peripherals. Sometimes, just replacing a monitor or power supply can drastically reduce power usage. Also consider power management and monitoring utilities such as Edison (www.verdiem.com/edison) for Windows XP and Vista. This free utility will allow you to set a power reduction schedule and calculate your savings.

Strategy #4: Pool resources with other companies

The use of hosted services is probably the most common approach to resource pooling. Web hosting companies and application service providers assume the up-front infrastructure and ongoing maintenance costs for their systems. These costs are divided among many client organizations — resulting in much lower prices to the end-user than if they were maintained in-house.

Another approach to resource pooling involves sharing hardware or services with other companies. Examples include sharing a broadband connection with others in the same building, sharing a Web server with a nearby organization, or creating a common office for videoconferencing, faxing, printing and copying.

Strategy #5: Make the paperless office a reality

The ideal of the "paperless office" has been discussed for a long time. Even after PDF documents became ubiquitous, many companies have continued to generate paper copies. With the current economic strain, it may be time to revisit the paperless idea.

Most word processors allow tracking of revisions while editing. Adobe Acrobat and a host of third-party applications provide the ability to add comments and manage electronic routing. With a good document control policy and minimum of effort, practically every business can eliminate or reduce the need for paper copies. This in turn will reduce waste disposal, storage, toner and paper costs.

Even in a recession, the old rules still apply. Tailor investments to the needs of the organization, and prioritize purchases accordingly. Just remember not to skimp on security, data backups and recovery systems. Although these costs may seem unnecessary now, the costs to restore critical data after a system failure or breach would be even greater.

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