Category: Personal

My failures as analyst

It’s easy to fail

7 years ago I re-started my consulting career. I had a mission to help companies “choose right” when it came to IT/Web/Computers.

It’s due time to evaluate myself:

  1. I succeeded in building up a consulting company in the respect that I’ve earned enough money to pay me a decent salary.
  2. I’ve had gigs that definitely are in my industry as the primary source of revenue so that is also positive.
  3. Have I though succeeded in my main mission, to help companies “choose the right” path in decisions regarding IT/Web/Computers? In some cases Yes, in most cases the answer is No.

To give a little better understanding of my failures, I give you an example. I managed to sell my services as an analyst to a mid-sized company (550 employees). The task was to give my thoughts about the company’s online presence including its online marketing. However, it turned out that my verdict didn’t suit the company’s IT-department, so the IT-department managed to turn down my recommendations.

In those analyst cases I’ve managed to succeed its been in smaller companies when no IT-department was there to stop me.

My failure as analyst was to understand that changing a company’s IT/Web/Computer environment is like ripping apart its body & soul. A company’s IT-environment is so embedded in a company’s DNA that to radically change it – you need to replace the CTO which an analyst rarely or never manages to do.

In hindsight I was naive in my thinking back in the year 2016. However, I’m not up on my mission to help companies choose the right IT-path, but I need to do it from another angle. I think I need to offer a clear path to success in order to get bigger clients instead of analyzing their current IT-environment.

Until i have this clear path, I’ll stop giving IT-advice, so the only advice I give you today; have a great summer🌞!

Lennart Svanberg

My best (and worst) decision

One of Swedens first Enterprise Resource Planning-systems

At the age of 14 I started programming. It was the best decision of my life. At the age of 21, after creating one of Sweden’s first programs for running a business, I stopped.

Until today, I’ve had my doubts about the decision to stop programming. I know exactly the reason why I stopped at the time. I saw myself staring into a terminal for the rest of my life and I dreaded it.

So I went to Business School, had the time of my life, and thought that to stop programming had been a blessing. I became a much more sociable person, learned about becoming a more emotionally intelligent person (at least I hope so), and met so many interesting people. My past didn’t matter, because as an adult business had become my passion, so I should make good money in my career.

To give a bit more context to my rationality about quitting programming it hardly existed any job opportunities in the beginning of the 1990’s. Computers that could run any serious programs were very expensive so the small community that needed programmers worked only for really large companies or the government.

Today, and for the past 25 years, the need for programmers has just exploded. Business people are always in demand but in relation to the number of programmers needed I made the worst career choice possible. If I had continued my programming career the last thing I would have thought about was potential shortages of jobs.

So, why am I writing this blog post now? Well, it turns out that I still love programming. This past weekend I’ve started to pick up Python.

Guess what, my old programming skills are still there.

I don’t know anything about the future, however, one thing has become clear; I need programming in my life!