Many of our clients, especially those in local government, are experiencing severe financial pressures, and are being forced to "Think the unthinkable" to reduce costs. For example, in local government, many councils are being forced to:

  • Reduce the demand for public services, especially in relation to adults and social care, which can account for 75% of a council's budget

  • Stop delivering services such as day care, home to school transport, and reduce the frequency of other services such as refuse collection, grass cutting and roads maintenance

Delivering these savings is difficult and many council's now expect the IT unit to contribute to the overall efficiency targets. Whilst recognising that IT investments can contribute significantly to new ways of working, enhanced mobility and property rationalisation, there is an acceptance that IT must contribute to lowering costs by optimising its own operations. At SSG Advisory we are working with our clients to optimise IT costs in such areas as:

  • Third-party contract costs by examining contracts to ensure they are fit-for-purpose and do not over-provision in such areas as licence numbers, SLA performance, and application functionality. We also look to reduce costs in such areas as ERP maintenance and database licencing through the utilisation of new market entrants who are capable of saving up to 75% of existing maintenance costs for such technologies

  • Application consolidation, to ensure that maximum benefits is derived from applications and that those which can be made "Redundant" through consolidation are actively retired and that financial benefits are realised

  • Infrastructure consolidation, such as replacing existing file storage services and telephony applications with Cloud-based replacements which can offer enormous savings in relation to infrastructure provisioning and telecommunications (data, voice, mobile) deployments and replace on-premise VoIP technologies

  • Deploying state of the art hyperconverged infrastructures to replace legacy server, storage and network assets; this can massively reduce costs in relation to infrastructure and operations

  • Outsourcing procurements and re-procurements where we typically are able to drive 25% cost reductions through contract specification and negotiations

Cost optimisation was originally a component of our "Sourcing" offering, but has now become so significant that we have dis-aggregated this function into a dedicated service area. Should our clients require it, we will embark on a cost reduction project on the basis of an equitable share of the projected savings. meaning you will have no-up front costs and will only share the benefits when they have been demonstrated.