I was your classic business guy 120 days ago. Nothing made me happier than uncovering a new growth opportunity, cultivating an international strategic partnership, or watching over EMC’s technology delivery centers in India, China, Russia, and Israel.

Now I’m a CIO overseeing an IT organization during a worldwide economic slump.

I actually received condolence notes when I took this job. Those notes made me laugh because, although it sounds counter-intuitive, I think this is the best time to be a CIO.

In down times, life comes into sharp focus. The objectives of the business become clear. I am, at the moment, very close to the business of EMC.

Read any study on CIO priorities, and you’ll see advice to “align with the business.” I could not possibly be more aligned right now. If I’m not driving revenue and efficiency, then I’m not doing this job satisfactorily.

Over the years as business unit leader—that is, as a customer and a seller of information technology—I interacted with CIOs across the globe. I used to notice that in bad times, the tendency was to cut IT costs unilaterally either as a top-down adjustment or to plan for the worst. I always likened that approach to the carnival game “whack-a-mole.” You slam one cost into a hole; it pops up elsewhere.

Instead of one-sided cutting, I’m spending to save. For example, to reduce energy costs and raise the productivity of hardware, I’m investing actively in virtualization.

Prioritizing IT investments like this boils down to balancing supply and demand. As a business, we’re in this together, which is why, early on, I asked EMC’s business division heads to help me ramp up the right things. From those meetings, I created a spending criteria list.

I ask: Would this IT investment get EMC closer to its external customers from a revenue, time-to-market, or service point of view? Would it (as with virtualization) make EMC more efficient? Would it reduce freight costs, improve vendor management, support globalization? Would it make salespeople on the road more productive? Would it support an entry into a new market?

These clearly include core infrastructure investments. You always keep those going, making sure that demand and supply for infrastructure is in balance with business requirements. For all new spending, I apply that litmus test. Projects that increase efficiency, productivity, and customer service are gold. Everything else must work hard to get funding.

In a different time, I might have spent four or five months working with my leadership team to create a perfect strategy for IT. Not now. I’m reluctant to take on big, multi-year projects because frankly, this is not the right environment. Agility is the watchword now. If EMC’s priorities shift tomorrow, we must be ready to help and adjust immediately.

There are no shades of grey. Some projects are nondiscretionary; others are things that would be okay for strong economic times, but not okay now.

When the world emerges from where it is today, I suspect very little tolerance for inefficiency will exist. Organizations will want productivity and profit to grow fast. If my IT organization isn’t ready to bounce back like a spring, I’ve failed as a CIO.

Talk to your customers, inside and out

EMC is a $15 billion company with a world-class IT shop. Daily, my team and I describe to EMC’s external customers how we run our data centers, how we govern IT globally, how we integrate technologies, how we structure our division. These are candid conversations. I want to have more of them, with more customers.

So I’m putting a program into place called “being EMC’s first and best customer.” We’re capturing our in-house IT best practices, taking them to EMC’s field organization, and, ultimately, to EMC’s customers. We’ve done this for years, but now is a great time to really formalize the program. We have so many good processes; we know how to get the most from EMC technology. And we want to get closer to customers during this downturn.

Opening our kimono of best practices to EMC’s customers also forces those of us in IT to take a hard look at how we need to be organized and how we should go to market with our internal customers. Could we be more agile? What are the three or four things that we could get really better at?

Such introspection is both top-down and bottom-up. My organization built (in six weeks) and now hosts an active social networking community at EMC that captures ideas from EMC employees across the globe about, for example, how we can be more efficient as a company and what we in IT could do better.

We are running with those ideas in real time. For instance, we recently announced a modified U.S. wireless-phone policy. Immediately, people started posting ideas on the forum about how to tweak it. We were able to issue an improved policy revision in two days. A few years ago, this might have required weeks or even months.

I realize I’m not unique as a CIO in what I’m trying to do. No CIO right now has the luxury to sit back and say, “It’s going to get worse economically, so I’d better not do anything because I don’t know when the bottom will hit.” The fact is, there could be a spring effect, an economic bounce-back. If you’re in IT lock-down mode, you’ll miss it. Then you have a bigger problem on your hands.

Look inward, and look forward. Invest in your architecture, get close to your customers, focus on speed, be ruthless about efficiency in the business. Those are the fundamentals that will hold you in good stead. And they may just help you help your company emerge from this downturn in a position of strength.

Sanjay Mirchandani is SVP and CIO at EMC, where he drives technological innovations to meet the current and future needs of the business. Recently, as SVP of the EMC Office of Globalization, Mirchandani was in charge of identifying global growth opportunities and building EMC’s processes and infrastructure required for global expansion. Prior to joining EMC, he was Microsoft’s Regional VP, Enterprise Services, Asia.