Most senior IT professionals at one time or another have been told to deploy an application that they believed contained quality problems, according to a survey carried out at Gartner’s recent Symposium in Cannes for Compuware, the software and IT services company. Most said the main factor was pressure from another part of the organisation.

That perhaps raises questions about some IT professionals’ backbone. But Compuware says the fault lies elsewhere. “This is further evidence of the gulf between IT and the business,” says Vange Yianni, Compuware’s technology manager. “With business people striving for competitive advantage and efficiency gains from IT, there is a great deal of pressure on the IT director to go live with projects. However, as we have seen in the past, going live with an application prematurely can end up costing an organisation hundreds of thousands of pounds and can often lead to a project being deemed a failure.”

Of course, the survey did not reveal whether the IT staff were being over-sensitive on some quality concerns or what the cost to the business might have been had the application not been deployed. As luck would have it, Compuware provides quality testing software.