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But the biggest concern by far is office politics, cited by half of those surveyed.

"The most frustrating part of my job is that there are too many fingers in the pie," Hahm says. "You have the committee influences--the executives, the department heads and middle management. There are a lot of politics involved in getting a system together."

There's a reason bureaucracies breed mediocrity, he says. "There's nobody who manages projects all the way through the implementation phase to make sure it comes out the way people expect," Hahm says. "There are mounds of paperwork about why it needed to be changed and there are all these approvals. It creates a crooked path to the end rather than a straight line. We start with a horse and end up with a camel."

This is a classic result of IT not being involved from the start. Hahm's department is now tasking a project-management team to track IT projects from start to finish. That's a smart move--by adding project management IT can identify issues earlier in the process, hopefully before the humps are added (for guidelines see "School of Project Management Wizardry").

Some technologists have simply accepted office politics as a fact of life, especially those at large organizations such as DuPont. Gil Choi, e-business architect at the Wilmington, Del., chemicals giant, says you can use a political organization to your benefit. "Sure, it's a bad thing in that you're constantly having to convince, cajole and backfight," he says, "but it's a good thing in the sense that you can leverage it to get people to think differently about how technology can help them."

It's why Choi thinks DuPont has continued to spend money on e-business projects. "Budgeting with regard to e-business is not being cut as badly as other IT spending," he says. Two projects are at the forefront: an enterprise portal to consolidate corporate information and a customer relationship management application rollout designed to improve marketing efforts.

Note that the projects Choi lists are business driven. Smart geeks know that they can use politics to their advantage by putting their projects into terms businesspeople understand, then showing how the initiatives will improve the businesspeople's lives. That's how you gain advocates who can influence budgets.

Bottom line: Banish the term "IT project." All projects, from ERP to running fiber, are "business projects."