What Do You Spend on When Money is Scarce?

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully," wrote Samuel Johnson. The recession has had much the same effect on CIOs. The results of our latest spending survey drip with ROI anxiety: IT budgets are being scrutinized more carefully, infrastructure investments are now tougher to justify, and fewer initiatives are being given the green light. With less ammunition at their disposal, IT executives are now concentrating their fire. Instead of experimenting and taking risks, they're targeting a few, select projects that should bring sure, swift savings.

"During the dot-bomb phase, we had more freedom to take on high-risk projects. But in this economic climate, ROI floats to the top of what we spend our money on," says Neil Hastie, CIO of TruServ Corp., the Chicago-based parent of TrueValue Hardware.

Most companies "are hunkering down, trying to cut costs," says John Ferreira, a partner at Deloitte (soon to be Braxton) Consulting in New York. And while strategy consultants like Rudy Puryear, a director at Bain & Co.'s IT practice, concede that recessions are an opportunity to strengthen your competitive position, the high-priority projects respondents discussed with us aren't quite so ambitious.

The reason, explains Puryear, is that the timing of the recovery remains an open question, and memories of yesteryear's dot-com fantasies and liberal IT budgets still gnaw at many CEOs. Top executives are asking CIOs to generate more benefits from previous investments and focus on projects that can produce an immediate payback—preferably through cost reduction. Those two priorities, along with information security and maintaining mission-critical systems, come ahead of market expansion and competitive positioning. "Take flat IT budgets and the first four priorities, and there's not a lot of dollars left over," says Puryear.

The projects we heard about target wasteful business processes, but they also provide opportunities to generate revenue. Take TruServ. Neil Hastie calls his high-ROI project "vendor-managed data." This system, which swung into full production in mid-2002, borrows the concept of vendor-managed inventory—placing responsibility for tracking inventory and ordering new supplies on vendors—and applies it to managing product information and photography used in catalogs, Web sites and stores, as well as logistics and accounting. TruServ's suppliers must provide up to 256 data points about each product, including marketing photos, country of origin, wholesale price and volume discounts, and cubic feet needed for storage.

EDI-type systems can be a costly burden for suppliers, but because this system can accept and integrate data in many formats—including XML, ANSI X.12 and Excel—even "smaller vendors can get on the EDI train," says Hastie. He estimates the system will result in "seven-figure" savings annually—in part by reducing the cost of producing catalogs by 35 percent—while increasing sales. TruServ will be able to create custom catalogs for large clients in days, and introduce new products to its 6,400 stores in six weeks instead of four to six months.

Meanwhile, Toronto-based builder Brookfield Homes is rolling out a Web-based system that goes after an irksome problem: the process of ordering and installing custom features ("options" in homebuilder's lingo) such as extra electric outlets and moldings.

According to Eric Simon, Brookfield Homes' vice president of IT, sales of options haven't been as profitable as they could be. Sales have been lost because paperwork didn't reach the contractors on time, for example, and revenues frittered away when salespeople sold extra outlets after the drywall was up, forcing builders to cut holes to install the new wiring. Lost sales have amounted to $2 million annually in the past, while errors cost another $4 million. The idea for the new system couldn't be simpler: Buyers go online and select options. "Instead of four or five pieces of paper, one stream of data goes into the back office," says Simon. Annual profits from options are now up to $6 million, with more expected as the rollout continues.

Still, there are companies that have major IT projects up their sleeves, even as they're taking a machete to their IT costs. Environmental Products Corp. (Envipco) USA in Naugatuck, Conn., a $30 million unit of the Dutch maker and operator of bottle return machines, has cut $500,000 in annual IT costs and laid off or outsourced most of its IT functions. Even its de facto CIO, Ron Frederick, is a consultant.

Yet Envipco is working on a new system, scheduled to roll out in the second quarter of 2003, for tracking bottle returns and managing deposit reimbursement payments from the bottler to the supermarket. The new system, Frederick says, will reduce its operating costs (in part, by moving off IBM mainframes to a Wintel platform), but the main goal is to improve the cash flow of its customers by speeding up payments to supermarkets from 30 days to two weeks. This may be the biggest, baddest recession that most CIOs have ever experienced, but companies aren't shutting down all initiatives—just winnowing them. Says Brookfield Homes' Simon: "The more experimental projects and prototypes are being put on the back burner during the hard times. We're not focusing so much on hunkering down as on projects that have proven value."