Before proposing the upgrade to the CFO, Hardner looked at the past year's deliveries and counted the times the lack of daily forecasts had cost the distributor an order. The tally easily justified the upgrade.

Riding Coat-tails If the dollar return on a project remains elusive, another way to make your case is to find legitimate links to an initiative with high returns on investment.

"You say: 'To get the CRM done, we're going to need the network switches'," says Jon Piot, president of consultancy Technisource. "You're just adding more cost to the project. It's like making plumbing changes in your house when you've got it all torn apart anyway for renovations." This approach, which nicely complements the "no IT projects" mantra, is the one used by Harrah's Entertainment. In 2004, the Las Vegas-based company, which already operated casino hotels in 13 US states, purchased Caesars Entertainment for $US9.4 billion. Earlier this year Harrah's wrapped up the ambitious undertaking of folding Caesars' customer-loyalty operation into its own.

"As we've added Caesars, we've had to significantly scale that system," says David Richter, Harrah's vice president of infrastructure. "We folded in literally tens of millions of new customers." That entailed significant IT investment in nearly every area of infrastructure, including redundancy. "Previously, we were on a fail-over model," Richter says. "We shifted to a high-availability model with two data centres."

"In a major project like that, the cost of infrastructure - platforms, networks and so on - is included in the overall cost estimates," says Harrah's CIO Heath Daughtrey. "And because that project already has ROI projections, the [infrastructure cost] is already in terms the COO and CFO understand."

Risk and Business To truly talk business, CIOs need to talk risk. But some CFOs say risk is a project element that's little understood and poorly communicated by most IT executives. "Risk is always part of the return picture, and some tech guys don't see that, which can be frustrating," says Robert Simmons, CFO at ETrade Financial. "As a CFO, you need [to know] chapter and verse about the reward and the risk."

While the naive might think highlighting risk will destroy the case for a project, the type and degree of risk can actually be a selling point. "If we're investing in a technology we understand perfectly, I'm willing to live with a lower predicted return than if it's a new, untested technology," Simmons says.

He is quick to note that ETrade's IT group understands risk. As an example, Simmons points to the company's move to open-source software, which began in 2002, early in the open-source movement. ETrade CIO Greg Framke led the initiative after the company's board determined that better scalability was crucial if the company was to grow out of the dotcom malaise. "Greg came back with a Linux proposal and told us here was a chance to break the vendor stranglehold," Simmons says.

The risk was undeniable: ETrade would be very early with a broad-based Linux initiative. But Framke hit a home run by convincing the board that one component that would not be risked was the customer experience. Open source might turn out to be a costly technological dead end, he says, but any pain would come in the form of worker hours and money, not angry customers. That convinced board members that the scalability advantages of open source outweighed the risks. Years later, it's clear that the gamble paid off. "We made two acquisitions in 2005, and they were enabled in no small part by open source," says Simmons.

The pressure is on for CIOs to translate proposed initiatives into business terms. Moreover, the discipline required to do so can help them better understand and prioritize projects themselves.