The person who fixes your computer did not show up today. Now what?
We see this in almost every company with fewer than 50 people. The I.T. knowledge lives in one person’s head. The company is one resignation away from being stuck.
One person at a small company knows the passwords. Knows the systems. Knows why things are set up the way they are. Nobody else does.
That person goes on vacation, wins the lottery, gets sick, or gives two weeks’ notice. And suddenly a basic task, resetting a user’s account, pulling a report, handling a vendor call, becomes a crisis. Not a technical crisis. A knowledge crisis.
The fix is not complicated, but it takes intention. Passwords go in a shared manager, not in someone’s personal notes. Critical systems get at least two people who know how to operate them. Runbooks exist, plain documents that explain what to do when something breaks, written so a capable person can follow them without calling the expert.
It sounds like busywork until the expert is unavailable at 3 pm on a Friday.
We built a whole white paper on this. Happy to send it if you want to check where your company stands. The audit usually takes less than an hour, and the gaps are almost always fixable without a big budget.
The question is not whether you have a key person. You probably do. The question is what happens when that person is not there.