So, although I wish this paragraph contained some crazy, silver-bullet solution of the big “…until now!” kind, that’s sadly not the case. What I do have is some encouragement from CIOs who believe that proving the value of technology investments can reasonably be accomplished. One CIO is being practical in his approach, the other is scoring points with the business through creative thinking. Neither is trying to reinvent the wheel; they’re just looking at what they have to work with and running with it. And perhaps most importantly, both are being proactive: They didn’t wait for the business to come to them with demands for financial answers.

I’ll delve into more details in an upcoming story for SearchCIO.com about monetizing IT, but one CIO taking the practical approach is Raul Cruz, CIO at AECOM Technology Corp., an engineering and architectural design firm with more than 45,000 employees around the world. Two years ago, he implemented a financial management framework that gets truly detailed in its tracking of costs associated with services, activities and projects. He’s applying that information to a SaaS solution that will make all those figures accessible to his team and, of course, the business.

Then there is Larry Bonfante, CIO of the United States Tennis Association. What he’s done over the last few years might be considered a kind of “creative IT recycling.” This phrase, which I just made up, isn’t meant to cheapen his efforts by any means — in fact, they have made the USTA quite a bit of money. Here’s just one example: The USTA runs the widely attended US Open. The 700,000 or so attendees gotta eat; and when they do, they can visit the food village in the center of the event campus or an outlying kiosk. Choices are nice, but until recently, the outlying kiosks could accept only cash because they were too far away from the central village to connect to the system. Enter IT with a Wi-Fi solution, and those kiosks now can take credit and debit cards — and the USTA can take in an additional $200,000 in revenue. You know the business had to, ahem, love that.

I know, however, that soon I’ll start to get pitches from vendors and analyst firms predicting which mobile device will be the next iPad; what the next big disruptive technology will be (the cloud won that honor hands down this year, with mobile devices a close second); and the one thing that CIOs can’t ignore.

For me, that one thing is monetizing IT, a trend we picked up on last year but which I believe will be a game-changer for CIOs in 2012. Technology has become so integrated with how a business runs and serves its customers that CIOs are being asked to contribute to the bottom line.

More important, they are being asked to help others in the enterprise contribute to the bottom line. CIOs are working with chief marketing officers to promote and create new services. Technology practices such as Agile are being adopted by the rest of the business to speed up product time to market and add value to the business. And CIOs are working directly with customers (external customers, not internal end users) to gauge how the business can create a better user experience.

Cutting costs, efficiency gains, business process automation — those all are givens. What CEOs want to hear about is technology that will capitalize on the enterprise’s information assets. They want CIOs to rein in big data to deliver new insights and make money.

We’ll also be looking at how some of the biggest stories of 2011 — consumerization of IT, mobile, social media, big data, shared services and the cloud — will continue to shake things up for CIOs in the coming years.

One more big story for 2012? IT staffing: Finding talent is proving to be pretty difficult, in part because the skill sets in demand are in constant flux, and in part because internal talent development isn’t enough of a focus within IT organizations. As one CIO said to me at a show: “What do I do with the ‘old people’ running the systems we have when we bring in all these new systems?”

Good question. What are your predictions for 2012?

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email: Christina Torode, News Director