In Pictures: 20 surefire IT mistakes

18. Underestimating the importance of scale

You may think you've planned for growth, but chances are your systems are rife with hidden trouble areas that will haunt you as your business builds out. Be mindful of process interdependencies. A system is only as robust as its least reliable component. Any process that requires human intervention will be a bottleneck for any automated processes that depend on it, no matter how much hardware you throw at the task. Cutting corners is another recipe for future headaches. As tempting as it may be to piggyback a departmental database onto an underutilized Web server or let an open workstation double as networked storage, resist. Today's minor project could become tomorrow's mission-critical resource, leaving you with the unenviable task of separating the conjoined twins.