You know customer impact is critical to your company's strategy, but how do you get there? Force the IT department to take on high-impact projects. "It's too easy to do a lot of internal stuff," says Paul Heller, CIO of Vanguard Group, the mutual fund company. Vanguard plots each IT project in one of nine boxes on a grid, with low, medium, and high ratings for client impact and operational impact, meaning increased revenue or lower cost. Heller sets a goal for what percentage of spending falls in each box and gets a warning on his dashboard if he's not spending on projects with high client impact.