Innovation for less

Budgets are tighter than ever, so a clear ROI and a quick payoff are mandates for most successful IT projects. But there is still money for projects that can quickly prove their worth.

“You really have to show an ROI that’s relatively immediate,” says Dave Green, general counsel for Corbis, a company that licenses images. Green took the lead on a project with vendor Digimarc Solutions to develop a digital watermark that safeguards Corbis-owned images, allowing the company to track license infringements and collect fees from violators. “We’ve actually become a revenue center to the point where we’re recovering a substantial multiple of the technology cost,” Green says.

IT managers are putting caps on spending, even for projects with a clear bottom-line value. Nearly half of the projects honored this year in the InfoWorld 100 had a price tag of $500,000 or less, compared with 28 percent of the projects chosen last year. The percentage of companies that spent $500,000 to $1 million actually rose to 12 percent, up from 9 percent last year. But only 20 percent spent between $1 million and $10 million, down from 26 percent last year (see “The Year of Leaner Budgets”).

Duane Vik, vice president of quality assurance at U.S. Bancorp, which deployed virtual storage as part of an updated business continuity plan, advises IT project leaders to “partner with the line-of-business managers who can help you understand the customer and market demands. By developing and presenting a joint technology/line-of-business recommendation, the IT department is positioned to provide the most value [at] potentially the lowest cost.”

Another lesson from this year’s winners: Drive a hard bargain with vendors. Some of the InfoWorld 100 project leaders who declined to disclose their budgets this year (13 percent of winners) say they were bound by nondisclosure agreements linked to special deals with vendors -- an indication that advertised prices may not match what many companies are paying.

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