Tired of the "mother, may I?" budget game, a CIO develops a holistic approach to IT priorities Gerald Shields, CIO of Aflac, didn’t much care for his whimsical budget dance with the CFO every year. “How much money do you need?” the CFO would ask. “Oh, around $15 million, or $3 million more than last year,” Shields replied. “Let’s try $8 million,” the CFO countered, “and if you need more we’ll talk again.”That’s when he decided a couple of years ago to add a “future projects road map” into Aflac’s existing IT governance process, to better predict his annual budget and the cost of individual projects. Shields tweaked the road map last year to help close the gap between a project’s initial budget request and the real cost.[ Discover what insights you can take advantage of from the other 2008 InfoWorld CTO 25 winners. ] The road map basically forces people to think in detail about their future projects — and their cost — before embarking on them willy-nilly. The result: “We used to way overspend or underspend our budget, but in 2007, we came within a few hundred thousand dollars in a multimillion-dollar annual budget,” Shields says.“The road map takes the mystery out of it and makes us much more collaborative,” he says. “By nature, I’m probably more collaborative than a lot of CIOs.”Shields studied past ad-hoc projects before developing the road map process. He analyzed reasons why, for instance, a $400,000 CRM project turned into $1 million — “Where’s the pork that got on this bill going through Congress?” he’d ask. Shields also built a holistic view of projects into his road map. Now the road map categorizes future projects in five areas: revenue growth, regulatory compliance, operational efficiency, foundational improvement, and service quality. Thus, the annual budget for the coming year will be balanced in these areas, and projects get on the road map accordingly, as well as in relation to each other.During the year, a need for a project not on the road map may arise. In these cases, Shields will likely have to cancel an existing road map project to free up funds.The biggest concern with the road map is that people will ask for a lot from the get-go. “When you ask someone what projects they want to do next year, it’s kind of like giving kids a Toys ‘R’ Us catalog and asking what they want for Christmas,” Shields says. That’s why he had to get better at predicting the cost of an individual project, in order to grant a green or red light. The road map continues to show its worth. By October 2007, Shields’ road map for 2008 had 32 projects on it (including some run-over projects from 2007). Soon, Shields will know how much money he’ll ask the CFO to give him for 2009 — and more important, he’ll be able to show precisely why he needs that amount. Careers