From time to time, Ars performs surveys to help us better understand our audience's attitudes and preferences about various things—and this is one of those times. If you're an IT decision-maker at your company, we would be grateful if you'd take a few minutes and let us know your thoughts

Here at Ars, we're lucky to have one of the most skilled and technically adept audiences of just about any tech news publication in existence: that's you fine folks! A huge number of you are what the industry calls "ITDMs," or "IT decision-makers"—that most sought-after demographic that decides (or helps decide) whose applications and hardware your employers will end up buying. In fact, no small number of the Ars staff (me included) were ITDMs themselves in a past life, and it's a role we well understand.

ITDMs represent a huge cross-section of employees stretching from system administrators to "C-suite" company officers—it's a role that is often stressful and typically thankless, and it more often than not requires dealing with designed-by-committee requirements that can seem contradictory or insane. Nonetheless, the ITDM role is one around which a whole company can pivot, as the choices ITDMs make directly affect the tools and processes a company uses to generate its revenue.

Help us help you

On this episode of "Ars Asks," we're asking for help understanding the IT environments that Ars readers work in—specifically, you folks who wear ITDM hats. We want to know about the flexibility you have—or don't have—to evaluate new technology. We want to know how easy (or difficult) you find it when you have to communicate outside of your company with other business partners. We want to know whether your company prefers to deal with big single-vendor solutions or if you prefer an open-systems approach to getting things done. And, of course, we want to know more about how your business' business works now that practically every employee and every customer has a smartphone or a tablet.

Everyone is banging loudly on the "mobile computing has changed everything" drum, but we're interested in your experiences specifically, since you all are the boots on the ground—there's no better source of information about what really happens when you look beneath the buzzwords at how things are actually being implemented at real companies. To that end, it would greatly help us if you ITDMs in the crowd would give us your thoughts via a brief survey. We want to know what you like, what you hate, and what you're afraid of—and we especially want to know if you have any ideas on how to make things better.

Surveys like this help us to understand what stories we should be bringing you, so this is an opportunity to directly weigh in and tell us what you want. If you can give us 10 minutes or so to fill the survey out, we'd be grateful. Click here to get started.