By Larry Lange

Leading IT executives are coping with the economic downturn by seeking opportunities, in both IT and the contribution IT can make to the business.

Take Ted Mansk, Director of Infrastructure Engineering and Database for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. “We don’t see this downturn as added pressure on us,” he says. “We view it as a time of opportunity.” Indeed, Mansk’s group is working to make the insurer’s IT environment more cost-effective than ever before. “The business gets that,” he adds.

Or take David Guzman, Senior VP of IT at Acxiom Corp., a global interactive marketing and IT services firm based in Little Rock, Ark. He is another executive building IT opportunity. “IT is always under the microscope to link its services to business value,” Guzman says. “That imperative never goes away.”

Acxiom recently moved its IT architects and engineers out of individual business units into centralized functional roles. The goal: leverage their expertise across the enterprise — and cut fat at the same time. “We haven’t completely escaped the pressures of these tough economic times,” says Marty Sunde, Senior VP of Global Infrastructure Management Services and Customer Data Integration at Acxiom. “But these added cost pressures have stimulated a new level of willingness to change and innovate within our customer base, which will result in new Acxiom offerings and opportunities.”

Despite the downturn, or perhaps because of it, Guzman and his team have given the green light to several major IT initiatives centered around automation, virtualization and cloud computing. All the projects were designed to increase system efficiency and effectiveness, deliver cost savings to both internal and external customers, and help speed Acxiom’s time to market.

But alignment of IT with the business, long a goal of CIOs, is notably not among the Acxiom objectives. According to Ajei Gopal, that’s just as it should be. “Aligning IT to the business should be considered a weak statement today,” says Gopal, Executive VP, Products and Technology Group, at CA. Instead, he says, IT needs to work directly with the business in true partnership. “Cost containment and management are still important, but now that’s to be done in the context of driving the business forward,” he says, adding, “Now IT is the business.”