Mitchell Hansen, vice president of enterprise systems and services at Quest Diagnostics Inc. in Lyndhurst, N.J., said shifting to portfolio management has helped the diagnostic testing firm "significantly" reduce IT spending as a percentage of revenue over the past few years, to between 4 percent and 4.5 percent. "We have fewer surprises after the fact on projects," he said. "That's a true benefit of some discipline."

Avery Cloud, CIO at New Hanover Health Network in Wilmington, N.C., said that when he joined the health care provider two years ago, it was working on several resource-intensive projects that promised large returns on investment but "absolutely wore the [IT] organization out."

Cloud said he wanted to better prioritize projects and avoid having too many high-risk initiatives under way at one time. Fifteen months ago, he installed Compuware Corp.'s Changepoint application portfolio management software, which has helped New Hanover whittle its portfolio of projects from 150 last year to about 100 now.

This year, Cloud plans to start using the tool to measure the cost and business value of specific application portfolios, such as Hanover's nursing applications. That should help officials "make intelligent decisions, versus guessing when prioritizing projects," he said. Six months ago,

Bill Lewkowski, CIO at Metropolitan Health Corp. in Grand Rapids, Mich., launched a pilot of a portfolio management initiative designed to provide more visibility into project costs and returns. Lewkowski also hopes it will help stamp out shadow IT work. "We need to have a better single place of truth for our projects and services," he said.