As organizations look to streamline cost, one of the first departments where companies cut back is IT. This is no surprise. Information technology is often funded as a capital expenditure, and not seen as a cost of doing business. Thus, when IT cuts are made, managers can very easily see that expenses have been reduced. This makes sense, right? Actually, this type of action is often counterproductive, resulting in greater costs to the company.

Perkins Motor City Dodge, of Colorado Springs illustrates this point. The company had network switches that were five years old. The age of the switches and an increasing slowness on the network indicated that a hardware replacement was in order. To cut costs, management had considered delaying the replacement of the switches, but ultimately made the decision to move forward with the replacement. After the switches were replaced, the company reported a six-fold improvement in the speed of network traffic. According to IT Manager, Kris Armstrong, a process that used to take 3 hours to execute on the network now takes only 30 minutes.

Perkins has 139 employees and Armstrong estimates that 90% rely heavily on the network. Based on results from the initial deployment, he believes the speed increase with the new system will yield at least a 10% improvement in employee productivity. The effect on the bottom line is an efficiency increase worth more than $520,000 over the next 12 months.

As today's business tool of choice, the computer network allows companies to be more efficient and do more with less. To achieve this, applications and data must be made available to those who need it quickly, securely, and consistently. In other words, the key to efficiency is the availability and performance of the computer network.

This requires a fundamental shift in the way we think about saving money on our IT systems. Before committing to a new IT project, we must understand how those efficiencies will be created. Similarly it is important to be vigilant in maintaining the systems we do have, and keep IT maintenance as part of our yearly budget.

Failure to maintain current IT systems can lead to network slowness or device failure. In these cases, a loss of productivity may be the least troublesome outcome. Security and backup systems that fail may result in a loss of company data. A study performed by the University of Wisconsin indicates that 29% of companies that experience data loss are out of business within two years.

The old saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." However, if your IT systems aren't properly maintained, when they do break, it may be too late.