IT managers come clean over downtime

IT managers have admitted that they are often the cause of systems failures within organisations.

Following research from systems integrator Dimension Data which shows that downtime in the UK could cost the economy in the region of £38bn annually, one in three non-IT senior and middle managers expressed frustration with failing IT systems.

Two in five admitted experiencing 'e-rage', hitting equipment and often shouting at colleagues.

Stuart Robertson, an IT manager at British Petroleum, said that system uptime and reliability had been hyped up on the number of nines achievable, but conceded that human error was often to blame.

"Very few failures are caused by equipment failure. The vast majority of outages are caused by administrative error, software crashes or upgrades," he explained.

Research out this week from IT training company NETg found that IT personnel were the people office staff least want to sit next to at the company Christmas party, pointing to a popularity crisis for the IT department.

The group IT co-ordinator at a local council commented: "Alas, in the final analysis a very high proportion of systems failures are of the shot-in-the-foot genus.

"I'm afraid IT would have to come clean about our own frailties for us to get an accurate measure of just how much of systems failure is down to the hardware and software supplied, and how much is due to user error.

"And how much to the cleaners unplugging things and to our tweaking the software and abusing the hardware."