If you’re an IT manager or department head—the kind of person who routinely gets referred to in industry literature as an “ITDM”—you get to deal with a lot of uncertainty as part of your day-to-day job. I know because I spent a lot of my career in ITDM roles, worrying about things I could control, worrying about things I couldn’t control, and—worst of all—being perpetually unsure exactly where the shifting line between the two categories was going to be drawn in any given week.

Smartphones and off-premises cloud-based infrastructure have made running a modern IT shop even tougher, because suddenly you’ve got way more than just your own computers to worry about. Now you’ve got to deal with everybody else’s computers, too, be they racks of Amazon servers in a far-off data center or the unpatched Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone in the CEO’s pocket (and the CEO refuses to give that S3 up because they’re “comfortable” with it—they’d rather you quit your stupid moon-talk about “patches” or “hackers” or whatever and just make it work).

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I have bad news and good news, fellow Arsians. The bad news is that I don’t have any magic tips to help you out—no new tips, at least. But the good news is that we’d love for you to tell us about the things that keep you up at night—the spooky actors leaking data, the shadow IT groups building rogue servers under their desks, and all the other things that go bump in (and out of) the data center at night. Share your pain with us, readers! Share your pain and gain strength from it.

We’ve prepared a survey specifically for all you fine ITDMs who ride shotgun over infrastructure big and small. Whether you’re in a Fortune 25 enterprise architecture group or a do-it-all, one-person IT shop at a tiny garage business, we want to hear about your deepest IT fears. These kinds of surveys help us out tremendously with keeping the lights on here at Ars, since they give us critical insight into the needs of an audience like no other audience on the Web (you folks reading Ars really are special!). They help us understand what you are dealing with and what you might like to read about; this survey specifically will help us with deciding how and what IT topics we cover in the near-to-midterm.

No personal details are required, and we’re not doing the “take this survey and win a thousand bucks!” route. We’d simply appreciate your participation—if you can give us 10 minutes or so to fill the survey out, that’d be awesome. Click here to get started.