When Tom Murphy, CIO of Royal Caribbean Cruises, was forced to scale back his IT team last fall in the face of declining travel bookings, he decided to get scrappy. As part of battening down the hatches to efficiently support a 28,000 person company with 25 cruise ships, Murphy created a swat team within IT to identify quick hits?low-cost, high-return efforts.

The idea, as Murphy put it, was to "reinforce that you’ve got an IT team that’s thoughtful, creative and can do more with less." That idea has worked. By Murphy’s count, the team has returned more than $3 million to the company’s bottom line so far. "It’s been a huge success," he says.

In the current economic climate, IT executives are pushed harder than ever to provide a quick return on small, well-planned technology investments. Vendors, smelling opportunity, have jumped in with a wide array of low-cost?$100K or less?quickly deployable products and services. "There are a lot of vendors trying to convince you that there are quick wins out there right now," says Matt Kesner, CIO of Fenwick and West, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based law firm. While some quick wins are real, others are elusive?or even nonexistent.

We asked CIOs where their company found a big bang for relatively small bucks and how CIOs can make sure quick wins don’t turn into quicksand. It’s advice you can bring to the bank.

Password to Savings

As infrastructure management grows more complex, it has become ripe for low-cost, high-return initiatives?if you know where to look. One of the best quick wins Royal Caribbean found, according to Murphy, was a password reset program called P-Synch from Mercury Information Technology. For $25,000, the software allows employees to reset their passwords whenever necessary. This contributed to cutting call volume to the internal IT help desk by 35 percent.

Because Royal Caribbean had downsized its help desk team along with the rest of IT, the new software was critical to maintaining service levels with few staffers. "Plus, we’ve given the users control, and users love control," says Murphy.

Joe Iannello, senior vice president and CIO of the Movado Group, a watchmaking company based in Paramus, N.J., had a similar experience with a program called UpdateExpert from St. Bernard Software that lists for under $50,000, which automatically deploys and updates patches, fixes and other software to user desktops and servers. Iannello’s group supports 750 machines around the world and was able to cut staff time needed for patches and updates by 75 percent. As a result, the software paid for itself in less than six months.