Think small, quick, and impactful. That's the current mind-set of CIOs when it comes to IT spending and project planning amid the ongoing economic uncertainty.

CIOs aren't throwing Big Vision out the window, but they're under intense pressure to move up the priority list any work that can deliver returns quickly. For some companies, that means drastically cutting IT budgets, but that approach isn't universal--the companies we surveyed in November were exactly split, with a third cutting, a third maintaining, and a third increasing their IT spending.

More important is what gets done with the IT budgets companies have--only 16% of survey respondents say fewer new projects are coming through. Regardless of what's happening to the budget, demand for IT is up (see more data).

In this environment, the IT organization can't wait to be told what the company needs. CIOs and their leadership teams must work with business units to craft projects that make a noticeable difference to a company's cash flow by driving revenue and cutting costs. And they need to do it without abandoning the efforts that position them for eventual recovery. Tall order? This is the time when business technology teams' reputations are made or lost.

At the $10.5 billion-a-year insurer Unum, the long-term IT vision remains centered on a service-oriented architecture called Simply Unum that it launched a couple of years ago. But in recent months, as the company went through year-end planning, IT teams were created specifically to find quick-hit projects "that go beyond the strategic enterprise projects," says Jim Smith, Unum's VP of risk development and data warehouse.

Smith's team came up with about 10 such projects, including a new document management system to cut time-wasting manual processes in underwriting, such as printing out documents to scan them in. The company plans to deploy Microsoft's OneNote document management system by April.

In Unum's applications services group, a team of five people--likely to grow as large as 10 this year--had a similar mission and came up with an idea that delivered savings of more than $500,000 by optimizing mainframe batch processing and database access, for an investment of $150,000 in dedicated IT resources, says David McMahon, VP of applications management services. The savings are expected to pass $1 million in coming months. The big change, McMahon says, is going from "asking people in general" to look for such cost savings to making it a team's full-time job.

At Hologic, a $1.67 billion-a-year medical equipment company that specializes in breast cancer diagnosis, CIO David Rudzinsky says now is the right time to push CRM. That's right, it's expanding an enterprise application project--and even spending on consultants, from Innoveer--to wring more value out of the Siebel CRM platform it uses. Rudzinsky sees CRM first as a tool to improve sales management and second to improve salespeople's productivity, and he has projects aimed at both goals.

Rudzinsky thinks CRM can help a company through a tight fiscal quarter by spotting problems like gaps in sales coverage. So he's rolling CRM out to more business units and adding business intelligence software to analyze the CRM data. His team is pushing Siebel CRM data to salespeople's BlackBerrys for tasks like searching customer buying patterns before a meeting. "Instead of putting this off because we're in uncertain times, we're trying to get this done now," Rudzinsky says. Hologic hasn't cut IT staff, but it has frozen hiring, prompting Hologic to lean more on its contractors and consultants.

Van Baltz knows that feeling as CTO of Station Casinos, which has 18 casinos, including 10 hotels, in Las Vegas catering mostly to the locals--people who've watched their home values fall faster than in almost any other place in the country. Baltz has had to cut staff by one-fourth this past year, down to 100 people. Quarterly revenue as of Sept. 30 was down 10% from the prior year.