An article in the Chronicle references a study that cites carelessness as the major factor in IT problems , not viruses. Virginia Rezmiersk, from the University of Michigan, found that 40 percent of computer incidents are caused by careless actions.

Primarily, she said, the problems resulted from inadequate training to help computer users avoid trouble and from insufficient policies to deal with problems that do arise. Rezmierski said the results support her contention that many colleges and universities moved too quickly to implement IT systems without necessary “rules and policies about how we want to operate in a shared-resource environment.”

This supports my personal experience that IT is cast so often in the role of a change agent that precious little resources are left for business process details or policies. Inevitably this comes around to haunt us. It is also a point of friction within various areas within projects as members of project teams have difficulty completing and implementing their communication plans or fail to fully anticipate the results of decisions on other team members or aspects of the project. Of course, who suffers the most are our end users who are left as after thoughts to figure it out. While systems are argueably getting better and users are becomming more sophisticated, we continue to experience gaps. It’s a challenge, but no one said it would be easy.