Modern IT leaders are under more pressure than ever. They’re expected to keep employees productive, maintain airtight security, and manage increasingly complex hybrid environments, all while working with limited time, people, and budgets.
For most, every day feels like firefighting. Tickets, outages, and urgent fixes fill the hours, leaving little room for strategy or long-term improvement. But according to Harri Turtiainen, CEO of Applixure, this reactive cycle isn’t a technical issue; it’s a leadership challenge, one that, when addressed, drives far better outcomes.
After decades working with IT teams and leaders across industries, Turtiainen has seen a clear pattern: the most successful IT organizations aren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced tools or biggest budgets. They’re the ones with leaders who bring structure, clarity, and purpose to how IT operates.
“Great IT outcomes come from leadership, not just technical skill,” Turtiainen says. “The shift we’re seeing now is from technology-centric thinking to people- and experience-centric leadership. IT’s purpose has evolved; the forward-thinking IT leaders invest their energy in how effectively technology and digital tools support people’s success, not merely in keeping systems alive.”
This marks a defining change in how IT is led and how success is defined.
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A decade ago, IT success was defined by uptime, cost control, and infrastructure stability. If the systems stayed online and the helpdesk queue was manageable, IT was doing its job. But that world has changed.
Today, the metric that defines IT’s performance is how effectively it supports people, how smoothly employees can work, collaborate, and stay productive. In other words, end-user experience has become the new currency of IT leadership.
Harri Turtiainen explains that this change didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of years of digital transformation, hybrid work, and rising business expectations for technology to “just work.”
“Five or ten years ago, IT focused on uptime and infrastructure. Now, CIOs are expected to act more like employee-experience officers,” he says. “They need visibility into how well devices and applications actually enable daily work, not just whether they’re technically running.”
That shift requires a new kind of leadership mindset. IT leaders can no longer rely solely on system metrics or ticket counts to judge success. They need a clear, data-driven view of the employee experience, how fast devices boot, how stable key apps are, and how consistently security and manageability standards are applied across the fleet.
Without that visibility, teams drift back into firefighting mode, fixing symptoms instead of causes, reacting to issues instead of improving the system. Turtiainen notes that this is where many IT organizations still struggle: they manage technology, but they don’t yet lead through experience.
If there’s one universal challenge every IT leader faces, it’s balance.
Keeping employees productive, systems secure, and environments manageable, all at once, sounds straightforward in theory. In reality, these three forces rarely align.
“When you strengthen security or add more management controls, you risk slowing users down,” Turtiainen explains. “But if you focus only on productivity and flexibility, it becomes harder to maintain compliance and consistency.”
This tension is especially visible in mid-sized organizations, where IT teams are expected to deliver enterprise-grade results with limited manpower and tighter budgets. These teams don’t have the luxury of large departments or specialized roles, yet the expectations from the business remain the same: seamless, secure, and reliable IT.
Turtiainen has seen this struggle firsthand through hundreds of customer environments. What makes the balance so difficult, he says, is the lack of visibility. Productivity, security readiness, and device health are often monitored in separate tools, if at all, leaving IT leaders to make trade-offs based on assumptions or whatever issue is most urgent.
“Most teams still lack the visibility to see how these three forces influence one another,” he says. “That’s why so many end up making decisions reactively, based on support tickets or gut feeling rather than data.”
And as hybrid work, cloud apps, and personal devices blur the boundaries of IT environments, that balance becomes even harder to maintain. Small blind spots now have big consequences, from security gaps to performance bottlenecks that quietly erode productivity.
For Turtiainen, solving this balance isn’t about adding more tools or processes. It’s about creating clarity, a unified, data-driven view that shows how well IT truly serves the people using it. Only then can IT leaders move from firefighting and trade-offs to proactive, confident decision-making.
For many IT leaders, the days are a blur of problem-solving, fixing what’s broken, addressing the next urgent issue, and constantly responding to user requests. It’s an endless cycle that leaves little room for strategic improvement.
Harri Turtiainen argues that this cycle isn’t caused by a lack of competence; it’s caused by a lack of structure.
“When every day is spent fixing what’s broken, there’s no time to improve what could be better,” he says. “Leadership in IT isn’t about reacting faster, it’s about creating clarity.”
That clarity starts with defining what good IT actually looks like. In many organizations, even those with skilled teams, there’s no shared baseline or measurable way to evaluate IT quality. Without metrics, leaders can’t tell if their environment is improving or deteriorating; they only know when something goes wrong.
Turtiainen believes that’s why IT leadership needs a framework, not just more best practices. Technical expertise in deployment, patching, and security is already mature. The missing piece is leadership structure, a shared set of quality metrics and processes that turn operational data into management insight.
When teams adopt that structure, the difference is immediate. Conversations shift from “we think” to “we know.” Decisions move from gut feeling to data. And morale improves, because progress becomes visible.
“Teams that use structured, metrics-driven approaches move from reactive to proactive,” Turtiainen says. “They can see where they stand, what’s improving, and what needs attention next. That turns daily work from firefighting into continuous improvement.”
This shift doesn’t just change IT operations; it changes perception. Structured IT teams gain credibility within the business. They can show measurable impact, explain priorities, and prove value. In short, structure gives IT leaders both control and confidence, the foundations of real leadership.
You can’t lead what you can’t see.
For Turtiainen, that simple truth defines the difference between IT management and IT leadership.
Without visibility, IT teams are forced to lead based on assumptions, reacting to tickets, chasing the loudest problems, and hoping their fixes align with what really matters. It’s an exhausting, reactive way to operate.
“When IT leaders don’t have visibility, they lose control of the narrative,” Turtiainen says. “They end up leading based on what’s visible, not what’s impactful, and that’s where credibility begins to slip.”
Blind spots are the real enemy. A device that’s silently underperforming, a missing security patch, or an unnoticed drop in user productivity can all stay hidden until they become major incidents. And when resources are tight, as they are for most IT teams, those blind spots cost both time and trust.
With data, everything changes. Real-time visibility brings clarity, confidence, and credibility. It allows leaders to prioritize what truly matters and to communicate with precision, both to their teams and to business stakeholders.
“Management is about maintaining systems,” Turtiainen explains. “Leadership is about improving outcomes. With real-time data, IT leaders can finally see how technology performs for users, how secure and well-managed the environment is, and where improvements have the most impact.”
Data transforms leadership from reactive problem-solving into evidence-driven decision-making. It gives IT leaders the ability to tell a clear story, one built on facts, progress, and value. And in an environment where IT is often seen as a cost center, that ability to show measurable improvement can redefine how IT is perceived across the business. Good quality data turns perception into proof, demonstrating where investments drive impact, and why continued improvement is worth funding.
Even with the best data and visibility, leadership ultimately comes down to people.
Many IT leaders start their careers as engineers, experts in systems, security, and software, but few are trained to lead the operation. That’s where many organizations struggle: technically capable teams without a clear sense of purpose or shared direction.
Harri Turtiainen has seen the difference structure makes not just operationally, but culturally.
“What often separates successful IT leaders from others isn’t just people skills, it’s their ability to bring structure, purpose, and clarity into the human side of IT,” he says.
Too many teams, especially in mid-sized organizations, work hard but without a clearly defined goal. There’s no shared understanding of why end-user IT exists, what success looks like, or how progress is measured. The result is effort without alignment, good people solving short-term issues, but not moving the organization forward.
Effective leaders, Turtiainen says, start by defining IT’s purpose: to enable people to do their best work. From there, they set clear, measurable targets that make progress visible, — and help teams focus on the right things, prioritize their efforts, and avoid feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of tasks..
Structure is what connects that purpose to execution. Leadership flows from the CIO to IT managers, and further to specialists handling day-to-day operations, each person understanding their responsibility and how it contributes to the bigger goal.
“When people can see how their work connects to the outcome, everything changes,” Turtiainen notes. “It builds trust, pride, and motivation. Great leaders communicate that structure clearly and make data transparent, so people are encouraged to improve, not just maintain.”
This combination of structure and human leadership, clarity, communication, and trust, is what transforms IT from a reactive service function into a proactive driver of organizational success.
At Applixure, this philosophy shapes everything we do, helping IT leaders bring structure, visibility, and confidence to their environments. Because when IT runs with clarity, teams can stop firefighting and start leading.
Harri Turtiainen’s message is clear: the future of IT isn’t defined by tools, but by leadership. The leaders who combine data, structure, and purpose will unlock the full potential of their teams and their technology.
Check out our article & video: The 8-Step IT Leader Framework: Lead Smarter. Improve Faster. A framework that helps IT leaders move from constant firefighting to structured, measurable improvement.