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...

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...

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...

  It has been now a public secret: I'm starting a new venture with Blue Soft Group, a French IT provider, mainly active in France and Switzerland. This will be the opportunity to create synergies and develop projects on application development, professional services sourcing and any innovative joint projects (proof of concepts on IoT or Cloud technologies) that could be a technological answer to a concrete business need (yes, I like the concrete side of business: what's the problem and how can we solve the issue?).  Any information about Blue Soft Belux can be found on our Linkedin Company page (and follow us if you want to stay updated on the job offers :). Everything right here.

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...

 If you're a Sillicon Valley sitcom fan as I'm, you know that Big Tech has no other ambition than making the world a better place , which is one of the most misused, fake, hypocritical statement that Tech leaders do. And yet. There are, sometimes, real innovative ideas, potential breakthrough that could save people, improve health...and transform our planet for the better. In this post, I would like to promote the work of some colleagues, working on the  NTT's Medical and Health Vision toward the Creation of a  Bio-digital Twin. This attempt to duplicate your body, simulated through computing power, needs to perform researches for  acquiring and analyzing  biological information and enabling treatment in the body, namely, elemental  technologies concerning bio-digital twins. * Data-driven Medical and Health Support Created Using Bio-digital Twin * Efforts in Analyzing Risks and Factors Concerning Lifestyle-related Diseases and Long-term Care * Beh...