Think small, quick, and impact-ful. That’s the current mind-set of CIOs when it comes to IT spending and project planning amid the ongoing economic uncertainty.

CIOs aren’t throwing Big Vision out the window, but they’re under intense pressure to move up the priority list any work that can deliver returns quickly. For some companies, that means drastically cutting IT budgets, but that approach isn’t universal—the companies we surveyed in November were exactly split, with a third cutting, a third maintaining, and a third increasing their IT spending.

More important is what gets done with the IT budgets companies have—only 16% of survey respondents say fewer new projects are coming through. Regardless of what’s happening to the budget, demand for IT is up.

In this environment, the IT organization can’t wait to be told what the company needs. CIOs and their leadership teams must work with business units to craft projects that make a noticeable difference to a company’s cash flow by driving revenue and cutting costs. And they need to do it without abandoning the efforts that position them for eventual recovery. Tall order? This is the time when business technology teams’ reputations are made or lost.

At the $10.5 billion-a-year insurer Unum, the long-term IT vision remains centered on a service-oriented architecture called Simply Unum that it launched a couple of years ago. But in recent months, as the company went through year-end planning, IT teams were created specifically to find quick-hit projects “that go beyond the strategic enterprise projects,” says Jim Smith, Unum’s VP of risk development and data warehouse.

Smith’s team came up with about 10 such projects, including a new document management system to cut time-wasting manual processes in underwriting, such as printing out documents to scan them in. The company plans to deploy Microsoft’s OneNote document management system by April.

In Unum’s applications services group, a team of five people—likely to grow as large as 10 this year—had a similar mission and came up with an idea that delivered savings of more than $500,000 by optimizing mainframe batch processing and database access, for an investment of $150,000 in dedicated IT resources, says David McMahon, VP of applications management services. The savings are expected to pass $1 million in coming months. The big change, McMahon says, is going from “asking people in general” to look for such cost savings to making it a team’s full-time job.

At Hologic, a $443 million-a-year medical equipment company that specializes in breast cancer diagnosis, CIO David Rudzinsky says now is the right time to push CRM. That’s right, it’s expanding an enterprise application project—and even spending on consultants, from Innoveer—to wring more value out of the Siebel CRM platform it uses. Rudzinsky sees CRM first as a tool to improve sales management and second to improve salespeople’s productivity, and he has projects aimed at both goals.

Rudzinsky thinks CRM can help a company through a tight fiscal quarter by spotting problems like gaps in sales coverage. So he’s rolling CRM out to more business units and adding business intelligence software to analyze the CRM data. His team is pushing Siebel CRM data to salespeople’s BlackBerrys for tasks like searching customer buying patterns before a meeting. “Instead of putting this off because we’re in uncertain times, we’re trying to get this done now,” Rudzinsky says. Hologic hasn’t cut IT staff, but it has frozen hiring, prompting Hologic to lean more on its contractors and consultants.

Van Baltz knows that feeling as CTO of Station Casinos, which has 18 casinos, including 10 hotels, in Las Vegas catering mostly to the locals—people who’ve watched their home values fall faster than in almost any other place in the country. Baltz has had to cut staff by one-fourth this past year, down to 100 people. Quarterly revenue as of Sept. 30 was down 10% from the prior year.

But the IT team that remains is pushing quick-hit ideas to business units. Most recently, IT and marketing teamed up to replace a costly “scratch and win” promotion, which involved mailing scratch cards to members of its customer-loyalty program that they brought to the casino to redeem for prizes. Now it offers a “swipe-and-win” promotion, using people’s loyalty cards. In eight weeks, the team delivered the project—which involved adopting existing marketing campaign software, changing kiosk coding animation, and testing—saving the company more $500,000 “every time we run that event,” Baltz says.

This past year has made Baltz realize that the IT team needs to run faster, even as it’s gotten smaller. He’s even considering investing in software to improve IT’s own operations—something many IT organizations shun in a downturn. He’s considering buying a CA testing tool that could help speed up delivery by automating some processes developers have long done manually. It fits with a message Baltz gave at a recent all-IT team meeting: “Question everything.”

Similar thinking has Hilton Hotels CIO Tim Harvey looking with increased urgency at software-as-a-service and cloud computing options for the company, which has more than 3,000 hotels in 70 countries. Harvey began seriously considering SaaS early in 2008 as the technology matured, and he’s looking at all of Hilton’s IT for opportunities to move resources to the Web. Working groups are just now setting up the first tests.

Harvey also will do more outsourcing this year, part of the flexible capacity he says CIOs should always be thinking about, but that’s even more important today. Hilton maintains relationships with outsourcers that it can scale up and down. “You can’t set that up overnight,” Harvey says. “It’s about preparation for this type of event.” Hilton will send some of the development and implementation work for an upcoming property management software project offshore.

Hilton’s continuing to add features to its reservation and customer relationship systems, such as letting Hilton Hotels and Resorts guests preorder upgrades such as snacks and newspapers that will be ready upon check-in. It’s investing more in capabilities for online promotional deals and in its Chinese-language Web site.

The work on Hilton’s Chinese site is an example of Harvey’s team supporting the growth areas that may pay off in the short term, but more important, prepare the company for the eventual upturn. “You’re going to have to continue to think you’re going to come out of a tough economy, and when you do come out of it, you want to be stronger than when you went into it,” he says.

Alaska Airlines has the same customer-centric focus as Hilton and Station, trying to wring more value from its CRM investment. It recently deployed Siebel Loyalty Management software from Oracle, replacing a mainframe-based system that ran the airline’s Mileage Plan program. Alaska plans to make heavy use of the system’s “triggered events” features to give customers information and options when delays happen, or to offer promotions based on customer profiles and travel history.