Are you looking at all aspects of your business to identify cost savings?

I just read “Businesses prefer to cut in-house costs than challenge providers of outsourced services, survey finds” and just had to write a bit about the article.

The article, which reports on a survey by Alsbridge, claims that many businesses today are focused on cutting internal costs rather than looking at outsourced providers and services for cost savings.

According to the article, “managers are reluctant to question service providers because the multi-vendor ecosystems they have built are too delicate to tamper with and too big to fail. Instead, businesses looking to cut costs are focusing ‘excessively’ on in-house labour costs.”

Seems a bit strange doesn’t it…only looking internally for cost savings?  If you are looking to cut costs, wouldn’t you want to take a look at your entire operation to look for efficiency gains and places for savings?

According to the article, the reason companies aren’t able or willing to look at outside vendors is due to the complexity of the services those vendors provide and the intermingling between multiple vendor’s services and systems.  I realize modern organization’s are complex and the technology infrastructure to support these organizations is also complex, but complexity shouldn’t be a reason for not doing something.

I can’t think of a single argument that any CIO or IT leader (or any business leader) could make that would convince me that they shouldn’t look at every single aspect of their operation to identify places for cost savings.  I can’t imagine any level of complexity that would keep me from looking at every aspect of the business for places to save money.

What about you and your organization? Are you looking at all aspects of your business to identify cost savings?