About my Magma consulting activities

  Insights from WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2025, Berlin Yesterday at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin (thanks Julia Kordick), I attended a fascinating session on AI-powered COBOL migration. As a management consultant working with public sector clients, this resonated deeply with our ongoing challenges in legacy system modernization. The Technical Debt Crisis Technical debt in public administrations and large organizations has reached critical levels. Like compound interest on a loan, postponed modernization efforts are making systems increasingly expensive and risky to maintain. AI as the Game-Changer Let me share two concrete examples of how AI is revolutionizing legacy system modernization: Example 1: Tax Processing System Traditional Migration: 20 developers × 18 months = 360 person-months Cost: ~$5.4M (at $15K/month) Quality: 85% code coverage AI-Assisted Migration: 8 developers × 6 months = 48 person-months Cost: ~$720K Quality: 95% code coverage Productivity G...

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...

  If you ever tried to fully grasp the concept of Strategy (and, yes, we have, most of the time at least, reached consensus with what strategy is - but the understanding of what we really mean by Strategy is most of the time very variable) from an historic standpoint, I would recommend you to read the great book from Sir Lawrence Freedman: Strategy: a history. The author takes a full overview, from the Origins to the military contributions to the discipline to finish with the Business environments (where we discover that business management has not innovated that much, compared to what the military has provided to the discipline). A good investment of your time - especially in the digital and tech spaces, where people seem always puzzled by some ‘ strategic ’ questions.

  Being interested in the application of new technologies (understand how a traditional business model can be disrupted by new IT products, like taxi industry with Über, postal services impacted by the mail or leisure business (with AirBnB and the hotel industry)), I thought banking industry was worth some readings (a special report of The Economist to name it).     First, let's recap of what the core banking business is: organize the market place between borrowers and savers. Banks live on the interest margin between the two market players; organize the market payments, through offering several payments possibilities (credit cards, debit cards, international transfers etc.). Your local branch is charging you for this service; charging clients for several advices, like for brokerage or investments, for example. All those three activities are, more or less, equally important in a global banking revenue (I don't take here specialized banks...

Now that we have a new European Commission in place (and if, by any chance, you spent your last twelve months in a fridge, have a look here if you want to know more about it ), the political work may start. One of the major action item we have to work on (amongst many others, I agree) is on technology and the digital agenda (we all remember the 2020 digital objectives, with becoming the most competitive digital economy in the world ). Well, in the meantime, we had a financial crisis (still), budget discussions, wars, Ebola, UK out of Europe (oh, no, sorry, that's not decided yet)...and I have the impression that the road to our technology heaven is still very long. But. The Commission worked on an ambitious agenda and in the last Open Innovation Letter, the dates for the new Net Futures 2015 have been announced (March 25-26 2015, in Brussels). The event will be a bring together event, around all the hype tech topics of today (cloud, open technologies, software and services)...

What stroke me this year (let's pretend the year is finished, okay?) is the contradiction residing in the private and public sector trends: On one hand, democatric citizens claim responsibility (environmental, corporate social responsibility, food transparency and regulation of the financial markets, for example) - hoping probably with those requests to establish a more democratic and transparent society; On the other hand, we read every day in international press about democratic governements (remember? the one that was supposed to bring peace and democracy in Irak?) about spying and analyzing millions of communcation files, correspondance and messages exchanged amongst normal citizens, like you and me. The morality of this simple contradiction could be: Public sector and some 'democratic' states are eroding the trust for whom they are working for; 'Leading by example' is not a common practice within politics (surprised, hu?) ...but what's differe...

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published some months ago a report about Big data and where we really can expect to make significant gains (process improvement, doing more with better analyzed datasets, taking more efficient decisions within public or private sector etc.) The five key sectors MGI analyzed were: Healthcare in the US ; retail in the US ; personal location data (on Global level) ; manufacturing (Global level) and, my favorite one, public sector administration in Europe. The first question I would like to ask to our European institution is Have you read the paper and what’s your position regarding the drafted conclusions? A second (easy) one would be Do we have a similar institute that could extend the McKinsey research on Healthcare in the EU; retail in the EU? And final, but not least, are we coordinating some activities from the EU member states in order to win technology advantages compared to other continents? Where are we with Cloud computing legislation, lega...

Data from a recent survey conducted by CompTIA shows that skills shortages inside IT departments negatively impact corporate profitability, productivity, innovation, speed to market, customer service and security. Read the full story here.

Pretty cool, hu ? I can easily imagine what David could have done without Michelangelo :-)

I was yesterday and Wednesday in Paris at the Economic Intelligence fair ( http://www.i-expo.net ), where we met a lot of interesting people. A lot of conferences, dynamic products demo and some useful contacts have been made around the Competitive Intelligence topic. Interesting to note is that Web 2.0 is taking the lead within the new trends, even for competitive intelligence people (your learn so much with reading between the lines of a blog :-)

I had Monday an interesting discussion with Lorenzo, currently working at Merck Laboratories. It's good to see how competitive intelligence is organizing itself, taking care of some local cultural specificities, like the language or the sectorial needs (like us the information gathering the same for a consulting business or for pharma companies?)... BTW, a seminar will be held in Berlin around the CI and pharma topic. Have a look here .

I had yesterday evening an interesting discussion with the owner of a small furniture making company. It still amaze me how difficult it is for people that are not specialized in management (account management, marketing management, financial management etc.) to grow in Europe...Can Internet be a first answer to that kind of problem? BTW, here a good Competitive Intelligence entry page: http://www.bidigital.com/ci/

One or two pictures of the trip I made in NY last week; the idea was to explore any intiatives and business publications about competitive intelligence and knowledge management. I know the US event of the SCIP organisation will be held in Manhattan at the end of the month, but I'll probably attend the european sessions in October 06. A view of Manhattan (from the Empire State Building - Floor 86) For the ones that like Pop Art, here a famous picture (MoMA) Here left, a small market at Union Square. New Yorkers have still green on their tables ;-)