Between management and technology
there is almost always a translator missing.
What we find in almost every company
An IT team without resources, putting out fires, that knows exactly what it needs — but does not know how to ask for it in the language budgets are decided in.
And a management team that does not understand why technology always arrives late, costs more than planned and never quite solves what it was meant to solve.
Neither of them is doing it wrong. They are having two different conversations about the same problem.
A good part of our work is translating between those two conversations: turning technical needs into business impact, and business goals into technical decisions someone can actually execute. When that unlocks, a lot of problems sort themselves out.
Why we are called IKIGAIT
生き甲斐 — Ikigai is a Japanese concept usually translated as reason for being: what makes it worth getting up in the morning. It is often drawn as the point where four things meet — what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. Hence our name: ikigai + the T for technology.
Our ikigai is not technology itself. It is what technology does for a business: stopping it from being an operational burden and turning it into a real advantage.
In practice that means three concrete things, and some of them are uncomfortable:
That sometimes the recommendation is to buy nothing.
If the problem is solved by tidying up what you already have, we will tell you, even if the project is smaller for us.
That most companies use their tools at a third of their capacity.
Before adding another one, we look at what is already paid for and unused. That is usually where the unexplained manual workload is hiding.
That the plan is the easy part.
The hard part comes later, when the way people work has to change. That is where most projects fall over, and that is where we stay.
Who is behind this
More than 15 years deciding technology from inside the company, working with sectors such as pharma, consumer goods, retail, technology, tourism and hospitality.
IKIGAIT is a boutique, and that means something concrete: you talk to the person who decides, not to a salesperson or a junior. When a project needs skills we do not have in house, we bring in specialists we have worked with for years. Never the other way round.