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