Information Technology Failures: What the Media Says and Managers Know

Information technology (IT) is present in our everyday life and is a major part of both business and social infrastructures. IT system failures and negative media stories have significant impacts on an organization´s finances, users and on the system provider. Previous studies have demonstrated how the media affects stock markets and system use. However, studies of IT and the impact of incidents, or reasons for them, are usually restricted to a certain field of research. Thus, there is a distinct lack of cross-domain research. In this study, we conducted a news survey on IT incidents from numerous organizations and interviewed their management in question about common IT failures. We analyzed these two data sets to examine their differences, similarities and contradictions. Unexpectedly, the media gave rather fair information on IT problems; thus, in both data sets, the biggest problems in IT arise from socio-technical issues such as collaboration.