There’s one question I sometimes ask business owners.
And I almost never get a quick answer.
Who is responsible for IT?
Not who once set up the website.
Not who “fixes things when something breaks.”
And not who simply has the passwords.
I mean: who is responsible for the whole thing.
Usually, what follows is a roll call of people and roles. One person built the website. Another connected the internet. This one gets called when email stops working. Somewhere in accounting there’s a phone number of “the IT guy,” though he hasn’t answered in a long time. Formally, someone exists. In reality, no one does.
What’s important is that the lack of a clear owner rarely looks like a crisis.
More often, it’s the opposite.
Everything seems to work.
Employees do their jobs, clients book services, invoices go out. Nothing is on fire. Nothing is urgently broken.
That’s exactly why it feels like there’s no problem.
The problem doesn’t appear at the moment something breaks.
It appears at the moment a question is asked.
Why doesn’t this work?
What happens if we change this?
Who can actually change it?
Where is our data stored?
The answers sound uncertain.
“We need to check.”
“That’s not on our side.”
“It used to work.”
And that’s when the real issue becomes visible:
the system exists, but it has no owner.
This is how it almost always develops.
A business doesn’t grow according to a master plan — it grows task by task.
First, a website is needed.
Then email.
Then another piece of software.
Then cameras.
Then remote employees.
Each thing appears at a specific moment, to solve a specific pain. No one designs the system as a whole, simply because at the beginning it feels small.
The problem is that it stops being small quietly.
At some point, one change breaks another.
Updates get postponed.
Some things are “better left alone — just in case.”
No one is sure anymore what depends on what. Responsibility gets smeared across contractors, employees, and decisions made years ago. The system still exists — but managing it feels risky.
Having outsourcing in place doesn’t really change this.
Outsourcing solves tasks.
Responsibility is something else.
Responsibility is when someone understands how everything connects. Sees the consequences of changes. Thinks not only about today’s issue, but about what comes next.
Without that, a business lives in the mode of:
“If it’s not broken, don’t touch it.”
That’s not stupidity or incompetence. It’s simply the result of one specific element missing from the system.
Interestingly, when responsibility does appear, nothing dramatic usually happens.
There aren’t suddenly more technologies.
It doesn’t necessarily get more expensive.
Often, there isn’t even a major rebuild.
What disappears are the questions.
Can we update this?
Who set this up?
What if we break something?
There’s a sense that the system has logic. And that someone holds that logic in their head. From the outside, it’s almost invisible. From the inside, it’s very noticeable.
People rarely think about this in advance, because responsibility can’t be bought like a server or a license. It’s remembered when something is lost, stalled, or suddenly becomes critical.
Before that, it feels like “this will do.”
Usually, it does.
Until a certain point.
All images used in this article are fictional and were generated by AI. They do not depict real people, offices, or situations.