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...

  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...

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...

  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...

It has been a while since the launch of Blue Soft in Belgium (yes, we started in April!! Nearly six months already 😨😨😨 and yes (thanks for asking!), the business is doing good. We had this new venture started, but we also boosted our Magma head hunting pillar that was literally exploding during the Spring and the Summer. Several profiles we identified for our clients, in the automotive and industry sectors, offering new positions and new career changes to our candidates! Congrats to all of them and good luck with your new endeavors!! And as from end of August, we will continue to work within the Public Sector, through our NTT Belgium collaboration. A lot of fun (and heavy work) yet to come...

Is there something really new happening on the Internet space? I mean something else than cloud computing, refactoring old (crappy) code, revamping Amazon's web shop....and is the Internet of today a GAFA private money club, where the users have to pay for quality content, adds free music, first hand conversations, without the trolls, the haters, the product advertisements?  Well, it seems that some scientists are preparing another possible future for a network that should belong to anyone, without any closed systems, any 'owner' of infrastructure nor specific protocols (yes, in a way, we all have been 'vendor locked' in our private life). We all heard about the Facebook name change, the construction of a Meta Universe (let's hope we will improve the virtual copy)...but have you heard about DFINITY? Does the Internet Computer ring a bell? If not, I strongly recommend to have a look at this Swiss foundation and the work of Dominic Williams. Understanding the comp...

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. 

It is not that frequent that we can find a good management book, fitting for two groups of readers. When you share your days between 'business' people and 'technical' profiles, you might wonder how to bridge the gap between those two communities - and how could they feed each other? Well, I found the beginning of an answer with this book, which explains very clearly how to organize a strategic presentation and what kind of content 'business people' expect to get. If you're navigating between IT strategy and concrete deployment of those projects, have a look! This book is for you and is exceptionally clear about what you can achieve after your reading.

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...

When it comes to decide which infrastructure you need to buy, the question of the use and the purpose of the technology is always crucial. But once you adopt (as I suppose you do) virtualization, you probably built your architecture on well-known products (VMware, Hyper-V), being now influenced by the Linux Open Source techs, like Docker and Kubernetes. The slight difference between the two situations is that, today, your technology will probably define your data storage strategy. Let me explain. One of the big barrier of Docker containers is the data persistence. And you have basically two possibilities for data consistency: 1. working with Docker volumes, within the host file system; 2. working with a data container, being a logical mounting point where the data can be abstracted. And because of that data persistence need, 3 different scenario's can be sketched for a data strategy: (a) Docker data volumes can be put on a direct storage; (b) You can use existing storag...

Being for a long time a Quantum computing trend watcher, I have to say it is quite a breakthrough that has been published on one of the Microsoft blogs. One week ago, the Quantum research team from Redmond announced that a development toolkit had been released (with the appropriate language *Q*), for developers eager to learn how to develop on that kind of machine. Now, what is interesting, beside the learning curve [yes, the journey is the path ], it is to imagine the fantastic possibilities that this kind of computing power will deliver to mankind. After the Internet, the cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum computing could be the next big step and accelerate the development of all those major concepts like nothing else in the past. Find the topic interesting? Check this blog post and enter in a totally different ball game.

I don't know about you, but I'm a pragmatic. I like explanations, guidance, demonstrations to be clear, without any jargon or 'smoke' so that I can grasp and understand clearly what my interlocutor communicates. And one of my frustration within the Big data fuzzy world is that you already have thousands of possibilities, zillions of data sets and nearly that many programming languages in order to process data. If you don't believe me, have a look here below: But, that being said, let's focus on some clear, straight forward R text data mining solutions that you could find on the Qualitative Research in R blog. Check the link!