At the University of Hawaii, InfoWorld contributing editor Brian Chee shows how it's done: "My first New Year's resolution is to dramatically reduce the energy footprint of my lab by retiring my older, less-efficient servers in favor of blades. Future blades will be cheaper than stand-alone servers, and the . Overall, I think I can cut my server rack power usage in half, especially since I'm virtualizing everything now."

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7. Get serious about architecture. "Focus on enterprise architecture and governance," advises CTO Council member Jeff Gleason, enterprise architect at Aegon USA Investment Management. "During good times, we're usually too busy to worry about things like current state architecture, future-state road maps, and governance of project priorities and IT spend. Yet it's always tough times like now when we wish our enterprise architecture practice were more mature, that we didn't have so much redundancy, that system changes were easier and faster, and that project priorities are more clear. The architecture group is always talking about this stuff, but it's never until we have to cut costs that anyone pays attention."

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8. Get serious about business continuity. "Resolve to have a business continuity plan in place and to have at least one full disaster prep drill during 2009," advises InfoWorld Test Center editor Curtis Franklin. "There's no reason not to have a fully developed plan, and no reason to think that your plan will work if you haven't tried it."