IT MOOSE management is a term invented by Forrester Research for talking about the non-discretionary expenses that are required to keep an IT department running. MOOSE stands for maintain and operate the organization, systems and equipment.

To make sure that IT MOOSE is lean, Forrester recommends that CIOs should:

• Adopt ITIL, COBIT or some other framework to establish guidelines and a common language for IT operations and management processes.
• Closely monitor the performance of the existing operational systems.
• Consolidate servers and take advantage of virtualization.
• Automate things like data center asset management or compliance auditing whenever possible.
• Gather metrics about application usage to determine which applications should be kept, upgraded, replaced or retired.
• Employ contract life-cycle management strategies to streamline and standardize the process of negotiating with vendors.
• Use an IT Balanced Scorecard to reduce the amount of unplanned work. 

 

Learn more:

Andrew Bartles and Phil Murphy have developed a checklist of 20 best practices to help CIOs score themselves on their ability to control IT MOOSE spending. (Free registration required.)

 

Getting started with MOOSE management

To explore how the MOOSE management is used in the enterprise, here are some additional resources:

> Cost-cutting strategies for CIOs Get advice on how to determine which IT initiatives to keep, which IT projects to cut and how to avoid potential employee layoffs with the cost-cutting strategies and resources. > IT spending and budgeting SearchCIO.com has gathered the latest IT spending and budgeting information and advice for CIOs. > Business process management quiz for enterprise CIOs Enterprise CIOs navigating the economic recession are looking to BPM projects to streamline and automate operations throughout the business. Use this quiz to review our latest coverage and find out how to get a better handle on business operations, personnel, IT resources and more. > Enterprise ITIL and ITSM Learn more about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of best practices for IT Service Management (ITSM).

24 Mar 2011