Your job is to determine and evaluate every failure mode and associate costs and probabilities with each one. When you've done this exercise for every workflow in the organization you will then be in a position to rank the risks in order of value and likelihood.

Now you, oh wickedly smart IT guy, can look at your budget and weigh the value and risks of every operation and determine where your limited funds should be spent -- in other words, how to get the biggest bang for your IT buck.

After such an analysis you may find that the expected upside from new development projects is less valuable than, say, improving storage reliability. And that will, next week, lead us into the politics of tough times.