Lame jokes about IT support have been around since businesses started using computers, flying in both directions users are dumb, IT is lazy, "did you actually plug it in," "did you try turning it off and turning it back on again," and so on.
The results of a study released today by IT management firm Landesk, however, paint a more peaceful picture of the relationship between line-of-business and IT. Put simply, people seem to think IT departments are generally doing a good job tackling their issues.
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Of the 2,500 respondents to Landesk's survey (roughly 500 each from the U.S., UK, France, Germany and Australia) more than 80% said they would give their company's IT department an A or a B grade, while just 5% said they would give a D or an F. More than 1 in 4 said that they generally got their issues solved within an hour of reporting them, and 68% reported results within 8 hours.
What's more, Landesk's study suggested that users are generally fairly tech-savvy themselves 81% reported trying to solve their own IT problems before contacting support, and roughly a third were able to handle issues on their own at least half of the time. Less than one in five said that they could "rarely" address problems by themselves.
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Employees of small businesses were more likely to be happy with their IT departments than those of big enterprises 77% of respondents who worked at companies with fewer than 100 employees said their issues usually got resolved within 8 hours, compared to 56% of those working at companies with 25,000 workers.
The largest enterprises were also the most likely to see employees miss substantial work time almost one in 10 of workers at those companies said they lost more than 6 hours of work per month due to IT problems, compared to 7% overall who reported losing that much work time.