I have spent more than a decade in the gap between what an organisation says it wants and what it turns out to need. The titles changed along the way, from technical consultant to solutions architect to delivery manager, but the work underneath has stayed the same: someone describes a problem, and my team and I have to work out what system would actually solve it.
Most of it has been enterprise solutions for Sales and After Sales processes on CRM platforms, and internal collaboration and intranet platforms on Jive, for large European manufacturers. These are not glamorous systems. They are the ones a few thousand people open every morning and complain about, which is exactly what makes them unforgiving. There is nowhere to hide a bad design, because someone will hit it before lunch.
