The United States and world economies are going through tough times. Many financial services firms have suffered severe losses and many other industries are being impacted. Although business spending on IT has yet to contract overall, it has been reduced in the worst hit sectors to date, and is likely to be challenged overall in the coming months.

Although IT spending is not immune from a downturn, there are many facets of this spending that have become invaluable to business such as data warehousing and business intelligence.

At the heart of DW and BI programs is data integration. Whether it is performance management, predictive analytics, Master Data Management (MDM) or other data-centric initiatives, data integration is the cornerstone of these efforts.

In tough times, defensive companies need to retain their existing customers and improve their effectiveness at attracting new prospects. In a down economy they may gain new business more cost effectively by cross-selling and up-selling their existing customers. The best companies take advantage of their competitors’ weaknesses by investing in programs to capture their competitors’ customers and take away their market share.

Whether defensively trying to keep their customers or aggressively trying to expand their market share, companies need to expand their data integration efforts and leverage that data with the analysis to support or expand the business.

The projects to undertake in a tough economy will depend on whether your business is taking the defensive or aggressive stance. But regardless of the level of IT investment, your checklist of data-related projects that will produce business ROI may not require a huge budget:

Data Governance: Now’s the time to get the business involved in driving the ‘care and feeding’ of your company’s data assets. If you want to remain competitive this is one set of corporate assets that is too valuable to waste. This effort requires business and IT interaction. It is more about sweat equity than outside investment.

Data Quality: Take a critical look at your data quality and determine how you can improve it. Chances are you have much of what you need technically in your existing data integration software. What you need is an honest assessment of the state of data quality in your BI/DW efforts and then the will to fix it. Most of this effort dovetails with your data governance program (above.)

Integration Competency Centers: If you want to more effectively use what you have and reduce costs, think carefully about implementing an ICC. Many companies have scattered and overlapping integration tools, processes and groups. Tough times are often the best opportunity to break organizational silos.