Organization: Raytheon Aircraft Co.
Resourceful reuse of hardware: Server consolidation
Payoff: $500,000 in savings
Raytheon Aircraft was like a lot of companies in the 1990s. "Every time someone put in a new request for a new application, we’d get a new server," says Vice President and CIO Doug Debrecht. It got to the point where the 390 servers weren’t getting anything near the 70 percent to 80 percent utilization rate the company sought. When the recession forced the IT group to change its free-spending ways, consolidating server deployment was a good place to start.

By combining two or three applications on a server, the IT group has cut the number of servers from 390 down to 272, a total of 30 percent. The company’s bottom line has benefited from retired leases and reduced support costs, Debrecht says, and he even managed to sell a dozen of them.

The smart server consolidation has freed up enough cash for Raytheon to improve its IT infrastructure without breaking the bank. Recently, IT staffers implemented a storage area network. Raytheon employees now enjoy faster and more convenient computing services, and the company has reduced IT expenses by $500,000.

Software

Organization: Kirkpatrick & Lockhart
Resourceful reuse of software: Library of components for building client extranets
Payoff: A lure for clients
CIO Steven W. Agnoli knows that clients come to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, one of the nation’s largest law firms, for the quality of legal services, not for technical services. Nevertheless, K&L sees technology as a way to differentiate itself. "In the last two years, we sought to add value to our services by providing client extranets," Agnoli says.

Typically, clients want the same types of functionality for their extranets, ranging from document repositories, chat rooms and calendaring to topical law alerts, expertise locators and contact lists. K&L uses reusable software components to provide such functions; applications need be written only once. Thereafter, all the IT folks have to do is snap the various pieces together—which they can do as quickly as one day.

Agnoli hasn’t quantified the payback from the extranet component library, but he knows client service has improved. Recently, K&L’s extranet services played a part in landing two clients, he says.

Organization: Lands’ End
Resourceful reuse of software: Legacy order-entry system coupled with a product database
Payoff: $20 million in additional revenue
In 2001, retailer Lands’ End introduced Great Go-Togethers (GGT), a link between its product database and order-entry system. When a customer orders a product, GGT automatically opens a screen—on customers’ computers for online orders, and on the computers of customer service representatives for telephone orders—that suggests other products. "A customer who orders a shower curtain may not have thought to order the liner as well," notes Senior Vice President and CIO Frank Giannantonio.