A culture of "buck passing" between the different teams within an IT department is leading to serious project delays and system downtime, according to a new survey released this month.

The survey of 300 IT managers across the UK, France and Germany found that 99 percent claimed to have suffered delays due to staff failing to take responsibility for the resolution of IT issues. Almost a third said that this failure of IT teams to take responsibility for a problem, coupled with the ensuing postmortem to establish who was supposed to be responsible, caused the loss of over three man-days a month.

The survey identified a lack of communication between IT teams, a dearth of information about the state of systems and projects work, and the absence of clear lines of responsibility as the primary causes of this buck-passing culture.

"It comes down to cultural and organisational issues," said Stuart Beattie, systems engineering manager of IT management specialist Network General, which commissioned the survey. "The systems teams, the applications teams and the network teams often don’t speak to each other and when they do they use different terms to describe the same problems. When things go wrong, this leaves a lot of room for people to say 'it wasn't my job to do that', which means the CIO has to do plenty of digging to find the real source of the problem."

Beattie said that to tackle the "finger pointing" between different teams, and also help ensure everyone is clear about their responsibilities, IT chiefs needed to gain visibility over the entire IT department by ensuring that the different teams use the same integrated dashboard and IT management systems.

He added that CIOs should also look to re-organise internal teams so that instead of focusing on a specific technology, they support business services that stretch across different parts of the IT department. "If you get people to support the business service, rather than the networking or the apps, then you encourage communication lines between the different parts of the department," he said.