Today the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article describing the government's part in reducing overall spending, given the astronomical heights of the current and projected budget deficit (2 trillion dollars. I still cannot get my head around that number!).
So, in the "can-do" spirit, the White House began to promote their "100 Million Dollar Challenge" - President Obama asked his cabinet secretaries in various areas of government to find ways to reduce cost savings.
The interesting thing is that they didn't respond with creative ways to save money. They responded by improving on process efficiency.
Some of the improvements were so obvious as to seem silly (printing on double sides of paper saved the Justice Department over a half million dollars), and certainly in the grand scheme of things, $100 million is just a rounding error when compared to the federal budget.
But let's think about it another way - ANY savings is better than continued loss. And in this new economic era where efficiency and cost reduction can make or break a business, any little bit helps).
Technology, and the Internet, specifically obviously plays a tremendous part in this movement. Imagine streamlining sales, fulfillment, and accounting by eliminating paper processes and replacing them with online ones. Or targeting mobile users and increasing your site audience (and let's face it - mobile device access will only grow in the very short term). Technological investment is not a panacea, but when used wisely it can help small business like nothing else. Cost savings can be identified in many places, such as ink and paper purchases. How much more efficient can you become knowing you can email a process document, instead of printing it off and handing it to someone else? How long have you spent rifling through files and paperwork to find that one document that you need?
There are still habits that need to be broken. I still know people who print emails. My parents still print receipts from online purchases (I consider it a victory that they are using the Internet to shop, so I'll take it one small step at a time). I'm sure you can identify internal processes that can be best described as "print, hand-off, rinse, repeat".
But like the government, even changing just a little bit of your current processes can reap savings. And no matter how little, saving is always better than losing.