"A horrendous amount of unmonitored resources were going toward minor break-fixes that were unscheduled," says Hoffman. When he first joined Hyundai, 93 percent of applications that were developed internally required at least one bug fix. Now, he says, that figure has been whittled to 4 percent.

"Most IT organizations lack the discipline to run good business proc-esses," like tracking labor resources against projects, says Hoffman, a 25-year IT veteran.

In 2003, Hyundai didn't have an application-development organization per se. Each of the 40 or so people on the IT staff was responsible for developing and maintaining applications for the business units to which they were assigned. But in March of 2005, the company's IT organization was restructured as a stand-alone company, now known as Hyundai Information Services North America LLC, with Hoffman as the president and CEO. Hoffman has challenged his managers to apply a much more rigorous approach to procuring hardware, software and services, and this has helped the new IT organization continue to lower its operating costs, he says.

Spend to save

Joe Trentacosta walked into a different situation when he became CIO at Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) in 2003. At the time, the Hughesville, Md.-based electric utility "had a pretty neglected" IT infrastructure that hadn't been upgraded for about 10 years, he says. As a result, 80 percent to 90 percent of the company's IT spending over the next few years went toward updating its antiquated IT infrastructure, including the replacement of all 50 of its Windows and Unix servers and the creation of a state-of-the-art data center.