The most frequent question of the last few months has been "What are IT organizations doing to reduce costs in a downturned economy?" With constrained human and financial resources, the answer to this question can be daunting. The business still expects the same level of service with fewer resources. What's an IT department to do? IT Service Management best practices have always provided guidance for managing or lowering the cost of services without sacrificing quality. Frameworks, such as ITIL, advocate processes that net higher efficiencies and effectiveness, which in turn result in lower costs and higher quality. The better you are at doing something, the lower the cost of doing it. Here are some other ways ITSM can help reduce costs: Understand your costs by calculating cost per service, cost per customer and cost per activity. You can't reduce costs if you do not understand what they are in the first place. Create and analyze a Service Portfolio of services in th...