After more than 15 years working in IT, Stephen Withnall, group IT director at training, outsourcing and bureau services firm Spherion, doesn't believe that you can respond to business needs if you continually cut costs and staff.
"The big thing you lose when you take staff out is corporate knowledge," he argues. "If you remove staff there doesn't appear to be an immediate effect, but in the medium [term] you find you're unable to respond to business needs."
Withnall believes that despite the short-term gains this can lead to long-term pain. He said that one of the biggest challenges facing IT managers at the moment was to try and do more with less.
Withnall joined Spherion in January, and describes his role as effectively managing the communications and IT infrastructure, as well as the assets attached.
He said that because Spherion was formed out of a number of different companies, part of his job has been to finalise bringing together the disparate platforms and technologies these businesses had been running.
"It's both difficult and surprisingly rewarding," Withnall admits. He said that it was difficult because there had been multiple systems, and bringing them together was inevitably difficult. But he said that it had been a positive experience, and also good for team-building within the company.
Withnall said he had the goal of retiring a third of its server systems which are in place, with the functions currently carried out by these systems either rolled into new or existing infrastructure.
Another major integration project Withnall has had underway is retiring more than 50 separate e-mail points across its businesses throughout Asia, replacing them with about eight servers running Microsoft Exchange.
He describes it as being carried out in a very aggressive timeframe--start to finish the project took three months, with three staff dedicated to it and 15 local employees partially involved.
"The biggest barrier to our businesses performing well and interacting with each other has been clear and easy communication," Withnall said. "Attacking that has been my primary task--[we've]done that through centralising and standardising the phone system, and [also] the e-mail project."
Withnall said that with its phone system it had examined every location in the group, to make sure it standardised on the types of systems it used.
What about technologies he is keeping an eye on? Withnall said open source, Microsoft's .NET strategy, and other Internet technologies were all areas he was keeping a "weather watch" on.
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