Under tight budgets and short on staff, CIOs and their project managers have to piece together the appropriate resources for the most needy projects. "That's one of the hardest things," Powers says. But at least Powers, by virtue of her position on the executive team, is part of the process for setting new corporate priorities. She can work with senior company leaders and project sponsors to find out which projects are the most urgent, as well as "where we don't have demand and can redeploy resources," she adds.

The backlog generated by a new corporate agenda is worse for the CIO who has to scramble to execute a decision she wasn't consulted about. Rood has seen it happen: A CEO and COO decide that they want a CRM system. When the CEO tells the CIO about it, the CIO is clueless as to the reasons why the project is necessary. The new project sends the IT department scrambling to jump-start the CRM project — and pushes everything else to the side. "That will upset what the priorities are in terms of technology needs for the entire organization," observes Rood.

At The Queen's Medical Centre, Kudla wages a constant battle to ensure that all of his constituents know that every IT project has to be in sync with the centre's strategic initiatives. As a member of the senior management team, he considers his most important task making sure his peers are aware of — and agree to — the centre's priorities. Everyone, from senior executives on down, should know that a pharmacy management system is important for the hospital — and understand that rolling out the wireless PDAs for e-mail is "low on my food chain."

The Expectations Landmine

With requests for new projects coming from so many different places, expectations of the IT department have to be managed carefully. It's easy to interpret a backlog as a failure of CIO leadership: a deficiency in IT governance or a breakdown in business alignment. No CIO wants his department to be viewed as treading water in a sea of demand.

But when it comes to controlling perceptions, CIOs can be their own worst enemy. "CIOs have a tendency to overpromise, especially when they're new. And when they start overpromising, the application backlog builds," says Rood. Then CIOs are in the position of having to back off from their commitments, putting their jobs at risk. Rood notes that although a CIO should not discourage new technology, he needs to accurately assess IT's capabilities and manage business expectations of any project from start to finish.

Rood, who's been in the IT field for 26 years, says he learned this lesson early in his career. "When you're new, everyone wants to shake your hand, welcome you on board, take you out to lunch, and at the end of the day you've got 50 things from everyone to do," he recalls. "It all adds up to a backlog, and then you're going to be crying to the CEO: 'I can't do this'."

At that point, he says, CIOs either have to take the hit and not deliver what they promised (which could get them fired), "enter a crash mode, where they push their staff to the point of exhaustion to complete a project," or spend extra on contract labour to meet a deadline. "In any case, it becomes a no-win situation," he says.

Powers gets around the problem of not wanting to say no by sending the message that IT is a resource to be managed like any other — her IT organization can do anything given enough time and money. Then the onus is on users to justify and manage their requests through Worldspan's project justification process.