From the Punto Informatico web magazine (and some articles from Giuseppe Cubasia reported there)  here below an interesting point of view on the computer or IT specialist role particularly related to the Italian market (list of the articles).

The articles present Italian market as an IKEA shop, where big projects and innovations needed to give the country that necessary technologic framework have disappeared. A market with a short perspective, without any tendency and possibility for investments but based on cheapest and easiest solutions (most of the times technically improper and with a short life).

In Italy IT skills are mainly idle and experts are generally demoralized and not well appreciated due to market stagnation. Is interesting to see here the factors linked to this matter of facts, even if not of all completely obvious.

The IT expert role is itself particular and singular: to succeed in this field you have in fact to interpret client needs (also the unexpressed ones) and anticipate future potential problems.
Once the client has allocated the amount for the "system implementation", he rarely worries about production process or wants to know more about problems and unexpected events. He just requests the expert to solve the problem and know everything about the system, his product and his business.
When the system to build has a strategic importance and the risk is high the budget becomes really interesting. In this context small IT entities are out of the market, due to the lack of excellence required and lack of requested resources (also human). The most is the client experience and knowledge (also regarding his rights) the best will the market work in order to select the excellent experts.
Italy again acts as an exception. A market missing big opportunities and challenges is unable to select best IT experts and exclude (as it should) the companies with small and low motivated human resources, not capable to follow professionally client needs and survive and develop in the context. Italy has however good experts but, due to this matter of facts, they hardly get the deserved success and they are even excluded over 35 years.
Italy missed lots of chances to become a big country and lost many trains in the new technology world.

Italian companies don't usually pursuit best factor logic utilize. The common practice is to pay less possible for this or that resource or to implement that function into the organization (IT function in our case) arriving to the minimum level not to lose the entire staff (whose complete dismissal would be a great damage). Rely on project collaborator or underpay a resource until is convenient and is not lost from the the organization is really risky, especially in informatics field where human resources is the core for a service based Business.