How are you feeling about your team's IT project portfolio? Optimistic? Will some of your top projects save the company money along the way? Will all of them? When it comes to budgeting and setting expectations, IT managers are an upbeat lot. That was the overarching finding of our IT Spending Priorities Survey, where 453 IT pros answered questions on their project portfolio and funding methodologies.

It's hard not to read the survey data and think of anything but unbridled optimism. But it's not grounded in reality.

Our survey shows that IT pros are looking to spend money they won't likely have. Furthermore, there's a disconnect between the business process innovation that business units want and the basics that IT is getting ready to deliver--and that's troubling.

Our IT Spending Priorities Survey was spawned from previous InformationWeek research that showed IT teams typically are getting a slight bump in budget this year, but they're expecting to do far more projects than the anticipated increase should allow. So we decided to dig deeper into project expectations to see if we could determine how IT teams could pull off all those projects with such limited funds.

We came up with a list of 16 popular projects and asked IT pros to identify the two topping their to-do lists, telling us how they'd pay for them, and size up the short- and long-term impact on both IT and the company as a whole. What we got back was a whole lot more wishful thinking and a prioritized list that probably doesn't reflect the needs and desires of most line-of-business partners.

Everyone's going to spend in the short run but save in the long run, according to our research. And almost to a person, ...