The Return of the good old IT Genius-Heroes?

In the recent years, almost all inquiries from our customers began with troubleshooting of the existing software solutions. These were often quite serious problems that led to a near-complete production shutdown.

Every second inquiry concerned an IT expert who suddenly became unreachable and did not respond to messages.

Why is a single "IT expert" no longer enough in the office today, as it was the case in the past? Why are even a few used programs becoming a system that exceeds the capabilities of an average IT employee? Let's find out what we can all do about it.

07 Apr 2025 4 minutes read updated on: 07 Apr 2025

The Return of the good old IT Genius-Heroes?

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Русская версия этой публикации.

Many people remember times when there were so few business software solutions that their names were even listed in job advertisements. Fewer people remember, however, that these programs required training to operate them.

Every office had an "IT guy" who could solve "all computer problems".

Since then, a lot of water has flown under the bridge. IT-specialists have become so specialized that you can't get by without an "explanation squad." The number of programs has increased enormously, and it is often only possible to determine whether they are suitable after paying a considerable amount for each and every one of them.

But we couldn't have imagined how much our customers' requirements would change as well.

In the past, there was a clear connection between the business requirements of our customers and their current stage of business activity. Both we and our customers had a clear understanding of what we expected from each other.

But in the recent 5 years everything has mixed up and intertwined. We wondered what events in the "computer life" of a company are now leading our customers to us.

We no longer expect customers to immediately formulate ideas and concrete plans for the creation of customized software, as was previously the case. Everything always starts with the discussion of current IT problems. Sometimes it's even about discussing emotions related to communication with IT-tools and IT-experts.

How did this come about?

Our team for custom solutions is now approached by customers with a list of all the issues that occur in their entire IT infrastructure. What are these difficulties actually?

The first thing that became clear to us is that these issues never lie on the surface. You can no longer recognize them at first glance. It's more like diagnosing based on unclear symptoms. When we start researching, we always find out at least the following:

- An unsuitable and overpriced server selection.

- Multifaceted and very extensive programs that ultimately no employee wants to use.

- Many well-suited individual island solutions, into which you unfortunately have to enter the same data again from those other neighboring island solutions.

- And also tailor-made programs where their developers "fix something in one place" and something else immediately breaks down somewhere else.

And in this diversity, there is still something very important: work processes that are not covered by any software.

How come IT no longer helps as much as it creates problems? And at the same time, the IT component is often one of the most essential and indispensable parts of our customers' business.

Sometimes we find out when examining processes that the risk of an IT component failure is not obvious at first glance, but very serious because it can lead to a complete standstill of all business processes.

This is not related to ideas and plans, but to the survival of the company. However, an opportunity to make informed decisions in IT arises at last. Hidden costs and issues from the own experience make this possible.

The times when a troubleshooter was needed again in the office have returned.

However, everything has become a bit more complicated. Not it's not just a system administrator or a qualified nerd, but a software engineer at expert level.

Therefore, the main requirement of companies for experts today is solving current IT problems in business operations.

While we used to create a digitization concept from scratch, we now work with a concept already existing and previously built by the customer, which has holes and patches. Sometimes even out of mud and straw.

Tags: business business analysis decision-making consulting trends it-troubleshooting