No matter how carefully you plan and manage your slice of the IT budget, you’re going to mess up somewhere. Invariably, you’ll spend more than you should in some technologies, and less than you should in others. The trick — as detailed in “Spending Smart” — is to figure out the optimal budgetary mix across your IT portfolio and adjust accordingly.

“By now, 2007 budgets are set, at least in aggregate,” says Associate Editor Jason Snyder, who worked with five domain experts to fashion the article. “But any clever manager has wiggle room to shift dollars between projects as needed.” Snyder and company lay out a template that can help those managers spot sinkholes where budget allocations go to die, as well as areas where a bit more scratch could make a real difference in support of the business.

Our writers identified a wide variety of opportunities ripe for overspending, from overemphasizing auditing checklists to building monolithic apps. But in the underspending category, a single topic kept coming up: training.

That doesn’t surprise IDC’s Cushing Anderson. Although his research indicates that high skills lead to IT project success, there is little correlation between training and how skilled a team is. “So organizations don’t spend enough on training,” he says, “because they don’t see the benefits.”

As Anderson sees it, companies typically exacerbate the issue by throwing training dollars at a problem without evaluating the situation. The result: Employees get “the wrong training, in the wrong places, at the wrong time.” The organization gets zilch.

If managers would assess what the team already knows and what it needs to know, “they’d find the gap between those two,” Anderson says, “and layer on training that would be valuable.”

And that would be some smart spending indeed.