A 30% Change doesn't come from tweaking what you're already doing

What are the dictates you’re getting from Senior Management during these rough economic times? What changes are you planning? How will those changes position your team and your company when the economy eventually turns positive?
Incremental change isn’t really change at all. When we cut back an area by 10% we are denying ourselves a level of resource. We motivate our teams to “suck it up”, “get by” and “do more with less”. But, as Don Juan said in the Carlos Castaneda books, “Denying oneself is an indulgence. The indulgence of denying is by far the worst: it forces us to believe that we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves.”
If you want real change, if you want to gain competitive advantage by reducing operational expense and reinvesting that in IT that supports the business, you’ll have to do things in a fundamentally different way. You have to change what you do, not just how you do it.
In an IT shop, you have to change what you are. Are you a cost center that responds to requests from the business and tries to contain costs? Are you a group of ‘smoke jumpers’? Are you process builders and consultants to the business? How do you change from one to the other?
Some companies are making the change from ‘firefighters’ to process builders and they’re reaping big rewards. See http://www.opalis.com/upload/pressreleases/OpalisRohmAndHaasPressRelease.pdf or http://www.opalis.com/Case_Studies_Request.asp?cs=RohmAndHaas.pdf