I've been doing a piece lately that's involved me talking to a number of IT support types and they're all coming out with similar comments and views: too many managers, they're saying, are declaring that something is an IT issue when actually it's no such thing, it's a management thing.

This is often true. Take this clipping from the BBC's website. It makes it pretty clear that loads of data is going missing because - wait for it - taxi passengers in London have left 60,000 mobile devices in taxis during the last six months. That's one hell of a lot of numbers, even if someone only has (say) ten numbers on their mobile you're already looking at half a million phone numbers going astray. If some of the phones are smartphones with hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of data on them, you can be looking at millions of bits of confidential data, all going missing simultaneously.

This didn't make many headlines of course. People would rather hear that some incompetent in the IT department has failed to secure a CD that's gone missing, or that a Government department has lost all of its customer information. I suspect the truth is that a lot of the lost data has vanished for much more mundane reasons, and a look at how people are handling it offline would stop a lot of it.