The move helped Hassell get his arms around the total cost of IT, frommaintenance and projects to how much it cost his employees to parktheir cars. It also gave him a definitive way to ensure hisdepartment's service levels are up to par. His department benchmarksitself against other IT service providers to ensure good cost benefit.Another benefit: The IT and business sides are collaborating more thanever. Each business unit vice president is assigned an IT partner,whose job is to understand how IT can help the unit. When theShipyard's engineering division needed to implement a CAD package,creating a project team comprising engineering and IT resources was apiece of cake, Hassell says.

"We didn't have a turf war over who was in charge or who would controlresources," he says. "They trusted each other and had been integratedfor long enough that they were used to working together as a team.Even the engineering vice president had no problem letting thedivisional CIO take leadership of the project."

7 You Didn't Invent a Budget Squeeze

Managing with tighter budget controls may be new to you, but CIOs inlow-margin industries have been doing it for years. Budget constraintswill force you to be creative and resourceful, but working on ashoestring shouldn't paralyze you, Cargill CIO Taylor says.

"Just because we operate in a tight sector doesn't mean we can't donew or exciting things, like the proprietary plant optimization systemwe just built," he says. "You just have to watch the pennies."