Almost all European public services organisations (94 percent) are under pressure to reduce costs due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to new research.
Beancounters at Insight have added some numbers and divided by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that over half public services organisations have downsized their workforce, 46 percent are making an effort to sweat IT assets for longer and 23 percent have downsized their IT teams.
Meanwhile, the same organisations are also overspending on IT, with each wasting an average of £2.4 million on unused software licences alone – enough to cover the wages of 50 skilled IT specialists, says Insight.
Other sources of overspend are: duplicate technology because of lockdown purchases (cited by 66 percent of organisations); unexpected purchases by departments outside IT, which adds an average of £1.2 million a year to cloud services costs; an inability to negotiate effectively with software vendors (75 percent); poor lifecycle management (72 percent); and lack of IT consolidation, with different departments using multiple applications with the same functionality (74 percent) or having separate contracts for the same software (61 percent).
