About my Magma consulting activities

Taking advantage of the summer months to make progress with certain clients ( ironically , July and August are often the times when we advance most quickly , while focusing on some challenging or particularly complex deliverables ), I continually find myself surprised by the lack of information and the difficulty in obtaining concrete , established , indisputable data. In other words , there is a need to base decisions on clear and precise data, akin to a scientific approach .     In daily management— beyond just financial aspects—IT departments must rely on clear , precise , and concise reporting to facilitate progress in digital transformation or technical debt management. Modernizing an information system and simplifying an architecture requires reliable reports that detail which version of a specific technical component is being used , what benefits simplification brings to a particular process, and how risks can...

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...

  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...

As part of my CoVid19 challenge (yes, I thought that staying home and fighting the virus deserved some extra challenges, like passing Architecture and Solutions certifications or reading Proust , for example), I passed one month ago the Togaf 9.2 certification (a combined exam allows you to pass level 1 and level 2 in one shot). What's great when achieving those challenges is that it gives you the feeling that you're not losing your time, that even confined at home, you can still learn and grow (intellectually I mean. I'm far too old to gain inches). And once the certification process finalized, you get access to specific resources (projects postings on the Open Group site - available for certified people only) or a log in to the Association of the Enterprise Architects (AEA) portal . This association is working like the ISACA or the PMI groups, divided in local chapters (per country or per town), trying to disseminate local knowledge and stimulating the communities. 

After this special 2020 year, it might be time to think on what we've learned, what turned out positive, after all, on the pandemic. First and foremost, a first reminder would be that we're not all equal against the virus. And by that I mean on the genetical side, where you could be in good health but very sensitive to the infection. Or even older, but not knowing you carry it. That's the Russian roulette part of the game. A second lesson learned is that your attitude against the pandemic (and your profound belief on what to do or not) relies nearly exclusively on the way your favorite media are relating Covid19 stories. Which is quite frightening I would say. It reminds us that sources trust, facts checking are even more important today than before; look at the differences between crisis treatments in US, Brazil or Europe. From one side, you have a do nothing strategy, where people die in millions - and on the other side of the spectrum, a continent closing its internal bo...

It has now been so many months that COVID19 invited himself in our lives, forcing the whole planet to buy some facial protections, hand gel...and use technology to compensate the distance between us.  And, maybe, if you do the same kind of job that I'm doing, you still need to interact and to show (visually, graphically) some 'achieved milestones'? Well, there are some free resources you might have a look at. First, for any animation technique, online friendly or not, you can have a look at The Session Lab  where you will find zillions of animations and workshops techniques you can use with customers.  Another great online resource for Architecture maps design is the Online Diagram site  where you can access free and up to date icons, architecture blueprints, but also business analysis diagrams, balance scorecards etc. Finally, I would recommend the online Mural App  from where you can design a full online workshop and invite your customers to participate i...

It's weird that we had to face a global economic slowdown to gain in "maturity" and learn to truly work online, with virtual teams and remote connections.... Why couldn't we adopt a new way of working, before the COVID19 crisis? Because of a lack of trust from the employers? Because we all like social contacts so much that we can't refrain to commute every day (and enjoy the traffic jams)? Or because there is a need for sharing our communication in a face to face mode, trying to avoid any artificial interface between our eyes and our stakeholders? I guess the proper answers are a mix of all those reasons...but that's now for sure, that after four months in social restrain, working life will be changed for ever.

Disruption of the classical model creates a massive change in what and how we produce, we consume, we live. But where do we stand if we compare the business activities (what's the change, the progress we've made?) The volume starts at the inception of the business model. A startup is now Internet-based, in a optimal resource utilisation, focused on a circular vision of its economic model. Renting cheap office (if any), using collaborative and virtual spaces - and renting all what is needed to operate. This means very poor or low capital intensive businesses, with a strong profit margin if the costs are tightly controlled. Customers are close to the management - and so is the marketing strategy. Big data analysis, customer relationship management systems, all the info where insight can be gained and created (a kind of old 'back and trace' notion, but cloud-based. Modern). Improvement of productivity and efficiency. Every day, decisions, movements in the busines...

Technology does not stand still. We all know that. And after the personal computer revolution, we had the Apple 'renaissance', the cloud computing birth, Facebook, Amazon. But today, being personnally more involved in Enterprise Architecture projects, I have to say that fragmentation and technical diversity has brought complexity and an interwoven architecture landscape (just google on the Sysadmin or big data Open source landscapes and you will see what I mean) in every working environment. And now, it is leaving the IT rooms and Data centers to invade your life and your city. If we all can expect life improvement (more time to waste on social networks, for example 😏), better quality time and cheaper technical maintenance, the IT landscapes have become tremendously complex. Check on the new innovations that will be considered and installed by several big cities in the world and you will conclude that if the twentieth century was "the" management period, the nex...

Having decided to plunge and go back to the core IT industry (still in consulting, but with a clear shift from Professional Services to a major IT integrator, from KPMG to Dimension Data) - I faced, during those last weeks, the question of the transition.  During those last ten years, I worked as a CIO, leading several teams in network, infrastructure, knowledge management, ERP, development and we were, like in any busy company, working on several projects at the same time; The question is then exactly that one: are those 10 years experience the proper relevant track to become an Enterprise Architect (and, yes, you can anticipate my positive answer on that one)?  If we consider Enterprise Architecture as being the sum of four different architectural tracks (business architecture, data architecture, application architecture and technological architecture) - I guess the answer can fairly be positive. A CIO needs to take an helicopter view on what's happening in his co...

2018 has just started and this year will be promising and offering a lot of new projects, possibilities, meetings and...business development. After being 20 years working as sole director of the firm, I'm proud to anounce that my wife has joined our board and will be creating, developing and maintaining Magma Training, a new department where we will offer various trainings and certfication processes. Welcome on board Delphine and fingers crossed for the coming years in Magma Training!

While reading an interesting article on business transformation and the CIO role, I came to some clear statistics about what a CIO does in a day and how to categorize those activities (putting a name on the stuff helps, most of the time at least, to have a clear understanding and a very clear explanation when you have to explain it to someone else). Here are the categories (all credits go to the CIO Executive Council): 1/ CIO as business strategist spends time on: Developing and refining business strategy Studying market trends/customer needs to identify commercial opportunities Driving business innovation Identifying opportunities for competitive differentiation Developing new go-to-market strategies & technologies 2/ Modern CIO's also have a transformational role to fulfill: Redesigning business processes Aligning IT initiatives with business goals Cultivating the IT/business partnership Leading change efforts Implementing new systems and architecture 3/ ....

IDC, one of the major strategy ICT market analyst, will organize the 2017 IDC European CIO summit in Palma de Majorca. The theme of this year is the Über CIO, being the IT directors that might be, one day, leading a company as a CEO or a COO (who knows, uh?) Have a look at the IDC event website and I will report more info and news about those two days meeting on this blog and on my twitter account.

It has been 16 years today that we used a Belgian web domain extension, but it is now time to move on! As we're extending our activities with some new active partners, we thought it was a good opportunity to get a business international domain name. Pretty cool, isn't it?

Even if migrating some systems to the cloud remains a nightmare for any CIO's or project manager (security, speed of execution, costs of operations, integration with on-prem solutions), the trend is here to stay. But more than integrating the model shift within a daily management (think on developers, infrastructure and security guys that need to understand the shift, study the technology and develop / incorporate new cloud processes in their daily jobs), it is striking to note the poor documentation and literature available (and I do not include here the high-level marketing papers, but I'm looking for in-depth, detailed, product specific fact sheets and how-to's). And on top of it, every company I know is struggling with a very scarce resource: time! Projects need to be executed in a rush, in order to remain ahead of the curve (being competitors, niche start ups, etc.) How fast can the human brain be adaptive?

Being discussing operational IT every day, there is currently a new (re-born) trend for Enterprise architecture. But what do we really mean with the term architecture? How can we really understand the concept and what about the different business domains it covers? Basically, I believe it's fair to consider three or four different architectures within a corporation: 1. The business architecture, which stands for guiding people, processes and changes in the firm so that you can adapt the company to the disruptive market drivers; 2. The information architecture, where you will identify the information that are needed to make your business run. It also explores the new sources of information needed to drive the business and answer the disruptive market forces; 3. The solution architecture which will be your software / product portfolio. This includes applications, processes, schemes, shared infrastructure and services that could be a solution for a client; 4. The Technolog...

If we come back on one of the top 2015 investment sector, the FinTech phenomenon is quite interesting. Business Insider UK published an article (one week before the London-based FinTech event) estimating that Financial Technologies sector was around 49BN USD. That amount was, according to the article, spread like the following:     31,6 BN investments were done in the US;     5,4 BN in the UK;     4,4 BN for Europe (yes, Brexit was already a fact);     3,5 BN for China and 2,2 BN for India. And what the article also mentioned was that 25% of those 49,7BN were invested during the last five years (that's about 12,7 BN USD). But that’s from the supply side. We have a lot of products (peer-to-peer lending platforms; crowd funding; on-line broking etc.), but where are the data on the other side of the pipe? Who is actually using Fin-Tech products (and, no, your on-line banking platform is not part of it)? The VC ecosystem ...