With the subsequent recession, corporate attitudes about IT careened to the other extreme. Executives who once waxed poetic about transforming their companies using information technology came to view every IT proposal with skepticism. CFOs waved ROI variants such as internal rate of return, total cost of ownership and payback under the noses of their IT colleagues to keep them in line. If the previous era was a technocracy, this new dynasty was ruled by the bean counters.

Fortunately, attitudes about IT seem to be settling into a happier medium. While vendors are still trying to sell IT organizations on the notion that most product purchases can be justified with a nifty ROI formula--their formula-- there's evidence that customers are wising up to the fact that calculating technology ROI is a little more complicated than that. Effective ROI is something of a social science--part quantitative, part qualitative.

In a recent InformationWeek survey of CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, in fact, three-fourths of respondents said they consider intangible returns on technology investments at least as important as hard ROI numbers. What are those intangibles? They can include hard-to-measure improvements to a company's brand, R&D efforts, supply-chain relationships, product quality, customer service and other business areas directly or indirectly aided by IT investments.

While the survey found that CxOs are lukewarm on straight cost/benefit IT project metrics, they're not just looking for cuddly soft rationales either. For instance, they're very much interested in whether IT products under review are reliable, scalable and compatible with the current infrastructure.

So what's the lesson for IT professionals? Be prepared to show the potential value of a tech investment even if you can't line up the ROI numbers to prove it. A simple payback calculation might work fine for a network-monitoring application, for instance, but when it comes to getting funds for an ambitious wireless or CRM or policy-management initiative, you'll need to point to less concrete--though no less real--business benefits. Consider that half the companies implementing CRM software haven't established ways to measure the results. A cost-benefit analysis isn't the answer, but those companies can measure their CRM success in other ways, the most obvious intangible being: Did customer satisfaction ratings improve post-implementation?

Whichever kinds of ROI analyses you do, revisit them regularly to evaluate their accuracy. Hone those ROI calculations that prove too hard or too soft to predict results accurately, and scrap those that miss the mark completely. But be sure to take into account the nuances of ROI. While ROI is often a euphemism for CYA, it is nonetheless a fact of your business life that isn't going to go away.