It's that time of year again, and I don't mean the holiday shopping season. Rather, 'tis the season to build next year's IT budget. Whether you're responsible for the whole IT budget or just one portion, realize that the budget process is a common, albeit sometimes painful, experience shared by IT professionals the world over. It's no different at my company—here at ACME, we're putting on our business hats and preparing pages and pages of detailed justifications to help push our 2005 IT budget through the corporate bureaucracy. If your organization is like ours, with the fiscal year and the calendar year the same, you may also be dealing with another tricky seasonal problem: how to spend the rest of your 2004 budget before the end of the year. In tough financial times like these, having a surplus at the end of the year is hard to imagine, but it's not an uncommon one among IT shops where business and technology priorities have shifted during the year. Unfortunately, this last-minute spending is not as easy—or as much fun—as it might seem.
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