After stocks tumbled and earnings slid three years ago, CIOs took steps to rein in technology spending. They let people go, froze salaries, canceled projects and fired consultants. But those solutions can go only so far before cost-cutting begins to cannibalize essential operations, hurt quality and service levels, and stifle innovation. Tough times demand more than penny-pinching and bullet-biting; they require resourcefulness—creativity combined with a commitment to wring the most value from every IT dollar. From nearly 400 applications, we chose the 100 companies whose resourceful practices have best helped them preserve business-critical IT capabilities and, just as important, invest in new systems to drive efficiency and fuel growth.

"It’s really easy when you’re under cost pressure to adopt a don’t-do-anything, slash-and-burn sort of approach," says Doug Busch, vice president and CIO of honoree Intel. But the resourceful approach is not just to cut costs but to become better by improving efficiency without compromising quality. Busch is systematically reducing IT costs while improving services. His goal is to cut his costs per unit of service in half, which allows the savings to fund new initiatives, such as providing wireless laptops to improve employee productivity.

This redistribution of funds carved out of fixed costs is a common theme among the Resourceful 100 honorees, which represent more than a dozen major private-sector industries, nonprofits, government agencies and the military. They range from small startups, such as fuel-cell maker Plug Power, to multinationals, such as Procter & Gamble. Other hallmarks of the Resourceful 100: They routinely cultivate creative ideas for system reuse. They build adaptable and flexible staffing models and make thoughtful sourcing choices. They continuously improve the quality of their software development and project management. They add rigor to their decision making and build win-win partnerships.

And they do it all with alacrity—80 percent of our honorees routinely get a resourceful idea off the drawing board in three months or less, according to "The CIO 100 Honoree Survey." (Full results are online at www.cio.com/cio100.) Financial necessity may be the mother of cost-control invention, but in the most resourceful companies, managing IT staff and assets more effectively isn’t defined solely by business conditions. For our honorees, resourcefulness transcends the state of the economy. Resourcefulness is an ethos, a guiding principle for a corporate culture that continually questions whether there is still more value to be gained and more and ever smarter ways to invest precious assets. To sustain this principle in both bad times and good, 87 percent of our chosen companies rely on repeatable, often formalized processes to identify and implement resourceful ideas.