THIS week Apple rolled out IOS 5 and couldn't cope with user demand. Sony was hacked, again, and had 93,000 accounts compromised.

And last; but not by any means least, RIM, the company behind Blackberry had a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions where a quarter of their users couldn’t get their email. Not a great week for IT or IT providers.

This to me; and probably a lot of other people, raises a big question. If these massive companies with a combined worth of billions can’t work within and with IT successfully, what hope is there for anyone else? As IT service companies of immensely smaller scale are we all inevitably heading for failure at some point?

At this point, in true bombastic article style, you expect me to answer this rhetorical question with a resounding NO! Well, sit down with a stiff drink and prepare to be disappointed ...

Inevitably most businesses are going to screw up spectacularly; and by “spectacular”I mean “get comfy, prepare popcorn to watch the spectacle” spectacular! If it happens to your business there will be screaming clients, malfunctioning systems, heads held in hands and much gnashing of teeth, tears and upset. This will happen almost certainly, at least once, in the lifetime of your IT business.

So why are we all doomed? Well, it helps to look at what the previous three disasters all have in common. What all three events share is a complete absence of – or poor realisations of – processes to manage change; and change is where almost all IT problems arise ...

Apple didn’t estimate how many people would update to IOS 5 accurately; Sony hadn’t secured their systems correctly, even after the recent successful hacking of their old systems, and RIM didn’t have a fallback plan for failure when updating their present systems.

Out of the three events this week, only Apple has kept clients advised correctly and the other two companies are probably too embarrassed to do anything as they can’t realistically provide any viable excuse for what has occurred.

So what is the moral/point of this rambling narrative? The point is this: you will fail, you will mess up, you will upset people with failure, but if you have fully tested systems in place before the inevitable happens, then you’ll have more forgiving clients and less egg on face. Don’t give clients a false impression of infallibility and let them know how you handle the inevitable problems that will occur.

We can all manage failure, but we need to do it proactively and better.

:: Shaun Merifield is the technical director of Sapere