Why so many IT mistakes?

Well, here we are on the brink of another month-end, scrabbling around to finalize and deliver February's awareness module in time for, errr, February.  

This week we've completed the staff and management security awareness and training materials on "Mistakes", leaving just the professional stream to polish-off today ... and I'm having some last-minute fun finding notable IT mistakes to spice-up the professionals' briefings. 

No shortage there!

Being 'notable' implies we don't need to explain the incidents in any detail - a brief reminder will suffice with a few words of wisdom to highlight some relevant aspect of the awareness topic. Link them into a coherent story and the job's a good 'un.

The sheer number of significant IT mistakes constitutes an awareness message in its own right: how come the IT field appears so extraordinarily error-prone? Although we don't intend to explore that question in depth through the awareness materials, our cunning plan is that it should emerge from the content and leave the audience pondering, hopefully chatting about it. Is IT more complex than other fields, making it harder to get right? Are IT pro's unusually inept, slapdash and careless? What are the real root causes underlying IT's poor record? Does the blame lay elsewhere? Or is the assertion that IT has a poor record false, a mistake? 

The point of this ramble is that we've teased out something interesting and thought-provoking, directly relevant to the topic, contentious and hence stimulating. In awareness terms, that's a big win. Our job is nearly done. Just a few short hours to go now before the module is packaged and delivered, and the fun begins for our customers.