In my experience theres ways of making things run smoother IT-wise. Im a teacher at a school with about 45 staff. We have our IT-support outsourced to a company through the local council and we have a very stable system. Things work just fine most of the time but getting something changed is a glacial process. There is little flexibility and most of our software is the same as five years ago.
Five years ago though things were not as smooth. We had a generally high incidence of support tickets, there was a lot of frustration and anger directed at the IT people. A large portion of the support tickets were simple things attributable to user error or lack of information. So, my boss and I decided to try and do something to fix this. Today almost all support tickets are placed by me. If someone has a problem they tell me and I check it out first. Im pretty knowledgable about IT and able to tell when its something I can fix and when its something I need to pass on. The benefits of this is that if the issue comes from user error, a loose connector, broken mouse or keyboard or something like that it gets fixed at once and I teach the user how to avoid this in the future. I hardly ever have to reinsert loose connectors these days. I spend maybe an hour a week on average dealing with IT stuff and thats less than before when everyone made their own calls. It also means that when I place a ticket I include screenshots if possible, the machine ID, an error report thats relatively verbose and how fast it needs to be fixed.
The not so good part is that it still takes at least two weeks to get software installed, often a month, and that our IT people still havent learned to call me before coming out so I can sort out access to the wiring closets and so on. The funny part is that their infrastructure people are usually better at this than the support guys. Most of the tickets I place now are attributable to stuff IT has done without telling me, like messing around with the printers, "upgrading" the email servers so that noone can log in and so on. Frustrating, to say the least.
I have a Creative Ziio 7" Android WiFi tablet running Android 2.2. It works quite well and cost me half what a WiFi 16G iPad would have.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.