If I owned any stock in Sprint-Nextel, I'd sell it. I just spent 60 minutes on the phone resolving a billing issue. It's too complex to explain in detail, but suffice it to say that Sprint's billing system wasn't up to the task of the change their sales office made on one of my accounts and, as a result, they got a costly support call. 20 minutes of that call was spent by the support rep, who was very nice, and his supervisor hand calculating my bills. If they get calls like this on just a small percentage of their bills, they're eating all their profit.

This small example underscores for me the importance of properly working IT infrastructure for any business that doesn't have money to burn. It's easy to make the decision to not spend the money on IT and then wonder later why support costs are so high. It's hard to connect the two and even harder to spend the necessary money later when the pain starts.