As government agencies around the world struggle to keep inflation in check and the rumblings of recession grow louder, many businesses are facing a period of considerable economic pressure.

To help weather the turbulence, companies are scrambling to find ways to cut costs. And, naturally, as a major contributor to spending, technology budgets are under scrutiny.

With that in mind, Tech Radar Pro spoke with CTOs from various industries, who highlighted the best areas of the tech stack to target for cost savings. In this edition, we focus on controlling investment and software development costs.

Audit commonly used features and consolidate them

Regardless of the industry, the associated software market is inevitably large and could overwhelm those who aren’t necessarily sure what they need in a particular solution. The risk is that companies overinvest.

Graeme Curtis, CTO of cybersecurity services company Adarma, spoke about the need for organizations to avoid investing in multiple software solutions. He says it’s all about resource management, finding free resources and open-source (FOSS) and nurturing great IT talent.

“There are multiple ways for CTOs to get the most out of their resources, without compromising the security posture,” he told us.

“The first is to take advantage of the security features already included in the products used by the organization. For example, Microsoft E5 licenses include features such as insider risk management, Microsoft Defender for Endpoints, and more.

“If the organization’s computing resources are sufficiently and technically proficient, it would be worth replacing expensive proprietary tools with open source alternatives.”

“In large organizations, many departments use disparate tools for what is essentially the same function (for example, data mining or work planning). These toolsets could potentially be streamlined, saving technology and staff time, as they minimize system operation/maintenance requirements. »

Communicate software process changes across the organization

Echoing Curtis, Agur Jõgi, CTO of Sales CRM software Pipedrive, spoke about the consequences of not consolidating the software ecosystem and the importance of communicating and forcing change within an organization.

“First, if your company is a mature startup or an early-stage scale-up, you’re probably using a lot of different software to solve the same task. Some teams use Jira and some Trello to manage their backlog. Some use Confluence for document management and others Notion,” he said.

“This creates inefficiency and leads to confusion about where data resides. Sooner or later, this confusion must be eliminated because without clear rules the “zoo” of tools grows with the employees when everyone brings their favorite “pet”. However, you have to be careful with this, because with poor communication, these decisions can reduce motivation.

He also discussed the pitfalls of an organization that does not communicate effectively while developing its own software designed for consumer use, such as home security Where finance softwareand the importance of communication between R&D and customer service to ensure no time is wasted developing a great product that customers love to use.

“Most companies providing IT services have regular customer meetings and market research. Based on this, they decide on development plans and resources. Far fewer companies include both research and customer support team information equally when planning the roadmap. If you develop a product solely based on customer support information, your product will always be backwards. If you’re developing purely based on research, it’s easy to develop a nice product, but customers might not be willing to pay for it.

Automate software processes

We are still a long way from software completely replacing a human workforce, but it is important to emphasize that software is there to make life easier for employees and save time for everyone. After all, time is money.

Moreno Carcano, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity analytics company Nozomi Networks, is a big proponent of automation and suggests that one of the best ways for a business to save money is to ensure that its information systems communicate and work with each other. This is another reason why consolidating software into a single ecosystem is an important step.

“Technology is great because it gets things done faster, and in principle with less human effort. There are, however, several opportunities to ensure that the technology is also cost effective: the most generic advice is to become “obsessed with automation”.

“Leveraging automation enables [businesses] to be more efficient when creating software [to offer as a product to consumers]but also to create an interesting environment for software engineers, inspired to detect and avoid repetitive human work [for companies using software].”

“Automating the interaction between systems often requires a modern software engineering approach, where again automation plays a key role. […] to ensure that everything works and continues to work despite software updates, changes, etc.