Email tops IT support headache list

Jane Wakefield ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 06 Apr 2001 14:43 BST

Email is the biggest headache for IT support, according to research published on Thursday.

Forty percent of IT managers interviewed cited email software malfunctions as the biggest cause of IT support issues. The view is common across Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific regions, where 166 managers were surveyed. Glitches with email are cited as serious obstacles to a company's productivity, often halting firms ability to communicate for hours at a time. As a result, email problems are also seen as the biggest cause of workplace stress.

"It is astonishing that, in a world that is becoming increasingly automated, the simplest of tools, email, is causing the most support issues," said Terry Lawlor, marketing director of Support.com, the firm behind the survey. "This is compounded by the fact that many companies still have high-level IT consultants responding to these basic, time-consuming queries."

Other IT support-related issues cited in the survey include password resets (23 percent), office applications (20 percent) and networking software errors (ten percent).

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