Five months after the markets tanked in April 2000, temporary staffing company Manpower began to notice less demand for its services. Even as revenue slipped, however, the company’s 350-person IT department still had tons of work to do, especially since it was now charged with new projects that would help the company run more efficiently.

CIO of North American operations Peter Stockhausen and his IT management team responded to the challenge by devising an innovative approach to sharing staff within IT: a marketplace for allocating workers among various projects. To motivate managers to participate, Stockhausen gives them credits on their budgets every time they free up one of their direct reports to work on another manager’s IT project.

With austerity the order of the day, IT departments at CIO 100 companies have to be flexible when it comes to staffing. "We’ve had to absorb significant amounts of new project work without increasing our budget," says Stockhausen. Keeping IT employees motivated while providing them with training without breaking the bank are key traits of resourceful companies, and employing flexible staffing strategies like Manpower’s IT marketplace is one way CIO 100 honorees are getting the most out of their lean staffs. Fellow honorees Alliant Energy, Roadway and Royal Caribbean Cruises have created flexible organizational structures inside their IT departments to facilitate sharing and redeploying IT workers. (On July 8, 2003, after the CIO 100 honorees were selected, Yellow Corp., parent company of Yellow Transportation Inc., announced it would acquire Roadway for $966 million.) They also haven’t cut back on training even when resources are tight. Results from a survey of CIO 100 honorees show that 48 percent don’t plan to increase or decrease their staffs within the next year. And with traditional rewards such as bonuses, raises and fat expense accounts gone, CIOs have to find ways to keep their existing and often overworked staffs pumped up for completing mission-critical projects on time and on budget. Another way CIO 100 companies maintain flexible staffing options: They keep a stable of consultants, vendors and contract programmers on hand for when new work comes in that their lean IT departments can’t or don’t want to handle.

But being resourceful isn’t just about cutting costs, training on the cheap and redeploying staff. It’s about doing all of those things and still keeping IT services up to snuff.

Share and Share Alike

When Manpower’s revenue dropped off, IT kicked into high gear. The department developed an application that automatically posts reports on the company’s intranet so that they don’t have to be printed out on paper and physically distributed to 1,200 satellite offices around the country. It also worked with Ti3, a Plano, Texas-based custom applications provider, to develop an interactive voice response system so that the temporary staffers employed by Manpower can submit their hours over the phone rather than through time sheets.