Burlington Northern Santa Fe is another company that has avoided IT layoffs and is continuing to move forward on major projects, such as a replacement of its voice-mail system and an implementation of SAP's financial and human resources apps.
Jo-ann Olsovsky, BNSF's CIO, said the railway is cutting both capital spending and operational expenses within IT - primarily by not filling open positions and deferring work on some projects until next year.
But on the SAP and voice-mail projects, Olsovsky said, "we're either so far into it that you can't turn around or we just have to do it" because the systems being replaced are decades old.
Jerome Oglesby, chief technology officer at Deloitte Services, said the shared-services subsidiary of auditing and consulting firm Deloitte has made adjustments "in a lot of different areas." He wouldn't specify which ones but said that some projects have been postponed and others canceled.
Even with the cuts, though, Deloitte Services is deploying videoconferencing technology "at a very fast pace" to help Deloitte's operating units reduce their travel costs, Oglesby said.
"That's one of the differences now: Our investments are more targeted," he added. "You really have to get focused on looking at the basics of the business and the business bottom line."
And in many organizations, the bottom line is none too pretty - nor is the impact it's having on IT.
For example, the number of IT jobs in the US counted by the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses declined in each of the last four months of 2008. The NACCB, which uses data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, said its tally of IT employment fell by 63,000 jobs from August to December - a drop-off of nearly 2 percent.
One IT executive at the conference said his company has laid off a small number of tech workers as part of a move to cut its IT budget by about 10 percent. "The big driver now is cost management," said the exec, who asked not to be identified. But he added that the company hasn't canceled any IT projects outright.