In Pictures: 20 surefire IT mistakes

1. Botching your outsourcing strategy

Outsourcing mistakes come in two flavors. The first is the sin of commission: Outsourcing important IT functions to avoid the hard work of understanding them. Relinquishing those functions can make it hard to get simple things done. The other mistake is to hold onto functions that could easily and effectively be outsourced, especially in the era of cloud computing. IT organizations with an overt bias against outsourcing could be courting disaster. One example: Hosting mission-critical, revenue-producing apps in-house because you don’t trust third-party operations. Competitors more willing to rely on well-provisioned hosting providers will be rolling in revenue while you deal with inevitable downtime.