One of our best journalists (Indro Montanelli) wrote some years ago “Italians (are) capable of building a battle tank starting from boxes of sardines. However, they will be crushed by true tanks, when other nations start to produce them”. The aphorism applies also to the way we managed our Information Technology (IT) in the past.
Small Companies, Insignificant IT
More than 90% of our companies has less than 10 employee. This means that many companies have no IT staff at all or that they have few people with horizontal expertise.
Usually the aforementioned person wears (too) many “hats”, jumping from first level help-desk to network routing, from e-mail management to database administration and so on. The company pays no training so their knowledge comes mainly from self-study. Some of them use their free time to study and to keep their skills up-to-date. It is all about self-motivation, companies give no enticement to encourage their employees. A person with a marketable skill has an higher probability to change company or may ask for more money, so probably investing in training seems also like a bad idea to this kind of business. This kind of businesses has no budget for IT, so they always want to get blood out of a stone. If they buy an hardware or a software, it will be used as long as possible, also when it is so obsolete that it makes no sense to stay with the existing solution (do you remember the “boxes of sardines” we started from?).
To summarize: many small companies with small, obsolete IT and demotivated staff.
Continue reading on LinkedIn
