It’s not easy balancing budgets these days, and no one knows that better than federal information technology executives who are faced with frozen or declining funds. We asked a few of them for their best advice on saving money in fiscal 2007, based on how they dealt with budget constraints last year.

U.S. Postal Service
Any chief information officer who manages wisely has already harvested the low-hanging fruit, said Robert Otto, vice president of IT and chief technology officer at the U.S. Postal Service. As a self-financing agency that receives no congressional appropriations, USPS has budget differences that set it apart from other agencies. But like them, USPS must find new ways to cut IT costs.

Otto said he will look for savings in the agency’s desktop PC and server replacement policy. USPS has about 250,000 PCs, and standard industry practice is to replace computers and servers every three years. But Otto now questions that practice. With the processing and storage capacity and reliability of today’s computers, a three-year life cycle makes less sense than it once did, he said.

In 2006, USPS saved $30 million by not replacing its 3-year-old servers and PCs. With the agency beginning work on a fiscal 2007 budget, he has started thinking about all those 4-year-old PCs. “If I can take them to five years, I can save — again — millions of dollars in avoiding a refresh,” he said.

Environmental Protection Agency
Linda Travers, acting assistant administrator and CIO at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Information, said the EPA began reaping savings from IT investments in late 2004.

Her office deployed a managed desktop PC program with centralized support and service for computers from acquisition to disposal. The approach decreases the cost of in-house support staff for a savings of about $1.5 million a year.

That amount will likely grow in fiscal 2007 because other EPA offices are interested in using the service, Travers said.

The EPA also reviewed telecommunications expenses with an eye toward consolidation. Four years ago, the agency centralized the local-area network at its headquarters. It combined many area networks into one, six e-mail systems into one and 300 servers into 50. Those consolidations generated $2 million in savings. Travers said she expects more opportunities to save money in the coming year by consolidating Web-based mail and increasing bandwidth.