ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Whether you're a CIO, a CTO, an IT manager, or some other tech title your company came up with, managing costs is the least fun part of your job.

But with the economy humming along for the past couple of years, managing costs, while important, has not had the urgency it has when things are really bad.

This summer's credit crisis has put a pall on the economy and is starting to get everyone nervous. If your approach to your budget has been largely theoretical till now, it might be time to start taking it a little more seriously.

As part of a series on how IT managers (or CIOs, or CTOs) manage costs, CIO Insight lists the top five ways to cut IT costs. They are:

• Negotiate better practices from vendors
• Use server, storage or desktop virtualization
• Standardize technologies and vendor
• Consolidate data centers, servers, storage
• Purchase IT products as part of a group

Surprisingly, the magazine's research indicates that most IT executives say they stay within their budgets. "More than 80 percent of respondents say they meet or exceed their organization's IT cost-cutting goals or successfully manage IT costs," reads one of the findings.

Is this true? Have that many of you found the secret to successful cost management?

As writer Brian Watson notes, "There's no single recipe for successful cost management. Most CIOs say, however, that a proactive approach—enforcing budgetary discipline constantly— beats a reactive one, where budgets are adjusted or slashed in response to a revenue decrease or market downturn."

If you haven't been proactive in your cost management approach till now, it's probably time to start. The economy could be headed for a downturn and you don't want your IT department to sink along with it. What are you planning on doing to stay afloat? Let us know.