What will change in customer needs in 2026?
At EVERGO, we regularly discuss how the needs of organizations evolve as they navigate increasing IT complexity.
More and more often, these conversations are no longer about specific tools, but about meaning, accountability, and the real value technology is expected to deliver to the business.
This discussion is an attempt to capture the challenges that most frequently come up in conversations with technology and business leaders today — and how we view them through the lens of experience gained from years of transformations, mergers, and organizational change.
After more than 20 years of working on technological and organizational transformations, what do you see today as the biggest issue between business and IT that companies still struggle with?
The biggest issue today is not technology itself. The real problem is that organizations still do not treat IT as a set of services for which there is clear business ownership and accountability.
Very often, IT is “doing its job,” projects are moving forward, systems are running — yet no one can clearly explain who all of this is actually for and what value it is supposed to deliver. Without that clarity, technology starts to develop a life of its own, and the business gradually loses trust in it.
In many organizations, technology is still “doing its thing,” while the business does not fully understand the outcomes. What question should boards be asking IT much more often today?
Boards should ask much less often, “What systems do we have?” and much more often, “What business services are actually running because of this — and who is responsible for them?”
This is the shift toward service-oriented thinking. Only when IT is described in terms of services, costs, priorities, and consumers does it become possible to have a real conversation about value — not just about budgets.
Do you encounter organizations that have “all the right tools,” yet IT still does not work the way it should? What is usually missing?
Most often, what is missing is governance and clear accountability. Organizations invest in tools, but they fail to define who makes decisions, based on what rules, and in which business context.
As a result, tools do not bring order — they simply expose, more quickly and more clearly, that there is no coherent operating model in place.
Many IT leaders say today: “We have data, we have monitoring.” Yet problems still catch organizations by surprise. Why doesn’t access to data always translate into real control?
Because data alone does not create control — it creates the impression that everything is being observed.
Organizations are flooded with signals, alerts, and dashboards, but lack clarity about which of them actually matter from a business perspective. Without a service context and clear priorities, data does not support decision-making. Instead, it increases fatigue and reinforces reactive behavior.
Sometimes the biggest crises start with small, seemingly invisible issues. Which operational details are most often ignored — only to resurface later with real business impact?
Most often, these are areas that operate quietly in the background: certificates, manual processes, gaps in automation responsible for continuity.
These are things that attract no attention as long as they work. But when they fail, they cost the organization far more than even the most visible system outage. Paradoxically, the greatest risks often lie where no one is looking anymore.
Mergers and acquisitions are moments of great ambition, but also of tension. From your perspective, what determines whether an integration truly accelerates growth — or instead creates chaos?
It depends on whether technology is treated as a shared foundation or as a tool for defending local interests.
In M&A scenarios, cultural, political, and tooling differences surface very quickly. Without a shared operating model and a neutral point of reference, IT stops integrating and starts dividing. This is rarely a technology problem. It is an organizational one — and it is exactly what we encounter in most client conversations.
More and more companies are considering cost reduction by building IT hubs in Poland. From your experience, what determines whether this model actually works — instead of becoming just “cheaper IT”?
Poland today is not merely a cost-optimization location. It is one of Europe’s key centers for advanced technology and financial services — from banking and fintech to risk and compliance.
This model works only when organizations move not just work, but also responsibility and decision-making. The most effective hubs are not execution-only units — they are co-responsible for services and their quality. That is the difference between “cheaper IT” and genuine operational advantage.
Marcin Burakowski
CEO, Managing Partner