Tapio’s story
Culture beats code. Every time.
Culture beats code. Every time.
For change to succeed, people must be at the center.
All work starts with people and ends with people — whether it’s an AI initiative, a change in ways of working, integrating company cultures, implementing new systems, or sales and leadership.
Change does not happen on its own. It requires direction, structure, and commitment.
Commitment is not created through instructions, but through the experience that the whole makes sense — and that people have been genuinely involved.
What forty years looks like
Four decades in IT — leading nationwide projects, building critical systems, and teaching others to do the same.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, large ERP and CRM implementations were failing across Finnish organizations. The software was rarely the problem. Management arrived with a solution built from their own perspective — not the users’. The people who had to use the system every day had never been involved. Of course it didn’t work.
At that time, CIOs were rarely even part of the management team — unlike CFOs, CMOs, or CSOs. They carried responsibility for implementation without the organizational power to drive the human change that implementation required. Many lost their jobs over projects that were never really theirs to own.
ERP and CRM are not CIO projects. They are CEO projects.
What that looked like in practice
When selling PACS systems to major Finnish hospitals, I always involved the chief radiologist — not just the CIO. We looked at images together on a large screen. The conversation was about why the system was critical, why it was better than the existing method, and why it needed to be built for zero tolerance of failure.
That meant two completely independent systems — not mirrors, but genuinely separate: servers, disk systems, tape archives, backup systems, middleware, network. If one fails, you operate on the other. And the systems needed to talk to the patient records — so that when a patient was due back in three months, the PACS software would automatically retrieve their images from tape archive twenty-four hours in advance.
IBM adopted the same architecture as their global hospital solution. I still have the glass statue they gave me in Lisbon.
Zero unhappy customers. Zero sacked CIOs.
When a bank CIO said his was the most critical system — because if it failed, people would lose money — the answer was simple: “So what? I deliver systems where failure means losing lives.”
Project Manager and Project Leader — two different things
Throughout my career I led nationwide projects and taught others to lead them — including during my years at VTKK, the Finnish State Computer Centre.
A Project Manager handles timelines, budgets, and deliverables.
A Project Leader handles people, direction, and commitment.
You need both. Most organizations only think about one.
How every engagement worked
When organizations reached out, I listened first. Then the work began — studying documents, understanding the specific case, mapping how the current software version would behave in this exact situation with these specific requirements. Every case was its own. Software kept gaining new features and losing old ones. The question was always: how does this combination work here, for these people, with these goals?
That took days. Every time.
I was not the cheapest. But what I delivered was rock solid.
A new chapter, prepared deliberately
In 2009, I used my summer vacation from my IT company to travel to the United States and train with TripleWin and Nancy Johnson. A week learning to run her programs — on my own time, at my own expense.
The timing wasn’t right for the full transition then. But the direction was set.
SKILLhill is the result.
Not retired. Still working — bringing forty years of lessons to Finnish companies facing the challenge of making change actually work. Not just in IT. In any organization where change has been decided but hasn’t yet happened in everyday life.
How I work
The approach has always been the same:
Involve the people who will be affected.
Build direction before building solutions.
Measure what matters — including your employees, not just your customers.
Many organizations track customer satisfaction (NPS). Fewer track employee experience (eNPS). The connection is clear: when people are doing well, customers feel it. And ultimately, it shows in the results.
My partner Mika brought NPS thinking to Finland. Together we keep that message alive — because it still needs saying.
Direction before speed. Culture before code. People before systems.
Next step
If you are facing a change that isn’t moving — or one you want to get right from the start — reach out.
We can look at the situation together.
