EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani on Managing IT in a Downturn

These days at EMC, initiatives receive IT spending priority if they:

1. Increase revenue and market share and improve the total customer experience-for example, really raising the bar on tools for our sales/field organization, such as world-class CRM tools
2. Are architectures for the future-for example, deduplication technologies such as EMC Avamar software; flash-based storage; cloud infrastructure; or projects focused on application rationalization, globalization, or scalability
3. Improve the speed to market-for example, business intelligence tools, iterative approaches to deliverables and solutions, and tools that expedite business/IT investment decisions
4. Deliver measurable value to the business-for example, virtualization
5. Increase employee productivity-for example, rollouts of internal instant messaging to facilitate fast and efficient communication, or investments in videoconferencing