6 key elements of IT spend optimization: Your guide to success

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Is your IT budget flat or shrinking while costs continue to spiral? Is your organization facing the pressure of doing more with less? You’re not alone.

Waste is a persistent – and often unknown or accepted – factor of IT spending. As organizations assess every morsel of their environments in search of fat to trim, IT spend optimization has become a requirement for teams of all sizes.

In part one of our two-part blog series, we dissected the challenges of IT spend optimization and how organizations like yours can begin reclaiming latent value, including:

• The many groups affected by IT spend optimization, each with priorities to consider.
• Siloed decision making, governance gaps, and reactionary behaviors that stifle progress.
• How uniting ITAM and FinOps into a technology value group can dramatically reduce IT waste.
• How Spend Optimization Services help overcome prolific value management obstacles.

Now, let’s explore the six elements of a successful IT spend optimization plan and how, with the help of a trusted partner, you can continue to optimize well into the future.

The six key elements of practical IT spend optimization

As discussed in our previous blog, IT spend optimization is a continuous journey, one that’s dictated by your unique functions, objectives, and needs. Factors such as organizational structure, market vertical, business health, and leadership personalities all play a role in molding the unique shape of your strategy.

Though there’s no true one-size-fits-all strategy, there are several must-have elements we recommend you employ. These are:

1. Having a strategic plan based on shared objectives

This plan includes a roadmap and timeline driven from a candid initial assessment. Its action plan should determine priority areas of focus. For example, is the most pressing barrier visibility, process, alignment, or taking action? Do you need to place emphasis on software as a service (SaaS) utilization, cloud spend, or AI token consumption?

2. Ensuring your plan addresses your communications strategy

When you communicate your IT spend optimization plan to the wider organization, it should include details of what ITAM and FinOps intend to do and the rationale behind them. In addition, your communications strategy should encompass awareness, work to influence crucial buy-in, and sync with the goals and progress of change management.

3. Establishing and documenting policies and workflows

Your new policies and workflows can begin as high level or aspirational. Evolve them over time, rather than having all the fine details in place before realizing returns.

At their core should be a RASCI matrix, with plenty of stakeholders having a ‘supporting’ designation across inputs and tasks, and ‘consulted’ for decisions and deliverables.

4. Assign responsibility to working groups

With your ITAM and FinOps teams collaborating as a cohesive technology value group, further delegation can help effectively address specific facets of your IT spend optimization program. For example:

• Processing assured and consistent source data for use across a variety of purposes.
• Joint review sessions of consumption trends and future demand to plan spending commitments and vendor negotiations.
• Identifying collaboration champions to embed a shared accountability ethos via support awareness and change management.

5. Determine what success looks like for your organization

As with documentation, success will also evolve over time. Early KPIs could include levels of visibility across major areas of spending and consumption, as well as the measurement of cost containment actions. This can expand, adding granularity through cost allocation and unit economic analysis. Targeted, agile activity can look at specific vendors, processes, or platforms.

As maturity grows, you may shift focus toward proactive interventions to avoid creating waste and applying commercial levers. You may, for instance, add softer factors such as efficiency of throughput in acquisition, renewal, change review processes, and stakeholder engagement. Track your trends and wastage gap over time.

6. Invest in data quality and appropriate tooling

Partial coverage, inaccuracy, and inconsistency are significant obstacles to IT spend optimization. At best, they increase workload and potential for erroneous decisions while delaying time to value.

Your tools must reliably capture, normalize, and process data with significant levels of automation to support strong returns on investment. They need to fit into wider systems and workflows, with connectivity to enable communications, dashboard reporting, and governance. Insights they provide on your IT environment should go beyond cost, providing utility to a range of stakeholder groups.

Remember: IT spend optimization is an organization-wide effort.

All the above are crucial in leveraging shared objectives to translate a compelling vision into action. When you avoid a silo-based mentality, you allow your technology value group to achieve more while benefitting from the wisdom of crowds and different perspectives. The result is a reduction in existing waste and prevention of future leakage.

It’s important to share successes as a team effort. Capture learning for ongoing improvement and to compound the value you realize over time.

How SHI helps unlock value from wasted IT spend

Our IT spend optimization experts take pride in helping organizations like yours reduce costs, streamline operations, and achieve measurable business outcomes. With SHI^® Spend Optimization Services (SOS), we do just that – aligning our ITAM, FinOps, Licensing Advisory, Long-tail Spend, and Procurement capabilities into a single dependable practice.

SOS helps break down internal silos and address the challenges obstructing your IT value realization. We’ve designed our services to easily integrate with the technical delivery of cloud environments, AI solutions, and cybersecurity tools, as well as ITAM- and FinOps-related tooling, processes, and lifecycle management.

Our experts continually monitor the IT landscape, dissect trends and emerging disruptors, and use deep vendor relationships and knowledge to ensure you’re informed and prepared across the entirety of your assets’ lifecycles.

When you partner with us, you gain:

• Access to tooling partnerships with industry-leading capabilities.
• Experience and expertise across all necessary technical functions, including:
  • Implementation.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • AI deployment.
  • Lifecycle management.
  • Managed service operations.
• Account teams who can facilitate product sourcing and marketplace support.

Start your IT spend optimization journey today

While organizations are expected to do more with less, you can start reducing wasted spend by breaking down silos and building a long-term IT spend optimization strategy. By uniting ITAM and FinOps into a joint technology value group, you can reclaim significant value by evolving how you acquire and utilize technology, as well as how you track and realize ROI.

We believe this strategy aligns with the Gartner^®1 projection that, “By 2029, 60% of global enterprises will integrate AI-driven (software asset management) SAM and FinOps, achieving five times the ROI from cost savings while also accelerating green IT outcomes.”

By baking shared objectives and quality data and communications into your strategy, you can hit the ground running on your journey to value reclamation.

NEXT STEPS

IT spend optimization is wide-reaching. Luckily, you don’t have to undergo this journey alone.

Contact our experts today to see how SHI Spend Optimization Services can lessen the burden and return real value from your IT investments.

 

¹Gartner, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Managed Services, Yolanda Harris, Jaswant Kalay, Rob Schafer, Charity Hooper, 29 September 2025

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