About my Magma consulting activities

Discussing AI's ethical role in our lives, its future impact, and societal changes has become common. One critical issue often overlooked is how AI will influence global power dynamics, with each continent striving to dominate algorithm mastery - USA, China, Russia, India, and Europe. Articles on AI and ethics usually highlight three levels: first, the assertion that AI should benefit the common good, considering job creation and losses. This assumption requires validation. Second, major AI players (Microsoft, OpenAI, Google) promote potential revolutionary benefits, such as universal cancer cures or affordable personal medication, which also need validation. These developments depend on feeding data models and specialized algorithms, but the outcome may be catastrophic. Furthermore, at the third level, AI's military applications are ominous, with details typically undisclosed to the public. Interested readers can explore more in the AI and Ethics Journal published by Spr...

Ah, the passing of time—the ultimate thief in the night! If human memory were a goldfish, we'd be swimming in a bowl of forgetfulness. Honestly, who among us can recall the intricacies of every project or the names of all the people we’ve collaborated with? It’s a wonder we manage to remember our own birthdays, let alone the details of a career that’s spanned decades! And let’s be real, the irony of a curriculum vitae—that glossy snapshot of one's professional prowess— fizzling out to little more than a dry list of job titles is a missed opportunity of epic proportions.  So, dare we dive into the vault of memories? Picture it: 1996, when my youthful self-walked through the hallowed halls of SAP, ready to tackle whatever techno-terrors lay ahead. I was the go-to guru of network and Microsoft wizardry, tasked with ensuring those clunky Windows NT 4.0 servers didn’t turn into blue-screen holes of despair. Remember the glorious chaos of Windows 95? The struggles were real, ...

It can't be possible!! Nearly 9 months without a word, no picture, no comment, no tweet...how can that be? Well, this illustrates probably how busy we are in our sector, advising one client and then another, organizing meetings, calls, workshops and realizing that nine months have passed. During all those weeks, I have been working on two specific Belgian public sectors assignments (one in Brussels, the other in Wallonia), tackling their technical debt issue. The story is quite complicated, as both entities have been running quite old back office solutions. The modernization pathways is not simple and implies a strong architecture work...but we will get there 😆!! On the Blue Soft Belgium side, we have recruited new colleagues, proposed new client engagements (and won the majority of them, focusing on consultants profiles and a right match with the client's needs). It is a fantastic team we are building here and I'm thrilled to see what the future will bring us... BTW, if y...

Waw...time flies...Already five years working back as a business consultant, advising clients every day (and coping with the traffic jams folks, what a nightmare) - trying to help where and when I can, providing support with concrete and realistic feedback. In a nutshell, this year, I've been busy consulting for two major public entities, both located in Belgium. One where I currently conduct a technical debt reduction strategy (see my previous post on that matter) and another one dealing with the whole delivery department (PMO management, testing and development teams)...and it has been a lot of hard work!! The current complexity in IT architecture, cloud knowledge, generic and broad technical concepts, down to earth KPIs, are nowadays mandatory to run a workshop, to present some convincing arguments (why should the client change, right?)...and all that in a secure (security by design, of course) environment (should use plural here)... And again, this year has been full of great m...

  Now that the year has started, it's a new dive in the day to day business, running from one client to another, shifting between priorities and deadlines. And what strikes me this year, besides the energy crisis (and the IT CIO costs cut paired to scarce resources), inflation, climate crisis, the Ukrainian war, it's the motivation to change the current status. Let me explain. Now that the majority of budgets has been granted, there is the recurrent pressure to 'do more, with less' (less people, less time to execute or to test, less money to get things done) and a need to address the legacy situation within IT departments. Tackling the legacy (being the old systems and solutions, already obsolete or nearly out of date) is not a walk in the park. You need to get an accurate inventory of what you have in prod (back office, front office solutions, hardware, storage, security solutions, development frameworks, security solutions, language used to code...or even your project...

Time to move on, to pause and to reflect on what has been achieved during 2022. In a nutshell, we made this year a subtle mix of management consulting projects (heart of Brussels, regional administration), a second-level of Open Group certification in Enterprise Architecture and, during the last part of the year, we designed a specific approach for managing what is called technical debt . The concept of technical debt is broadly detailed online, but concretely, it addresses all the legacy, the old code, the old technologies a client might have in his IT ecosystem and that need to be updated to new IT norms (code language, software versions, security levels etc.) A quite funny journey 😅 On our recruitment side, Magma filled every client request with a new candidate and quite great profiles were recruited. Congrats to our partner Delphine that made that amazing job! And, last and certainly not least, we hired 2 people for Blue Soft Belgium, bringing the team to 4. And this is a first y...