About my Magma consulting activities

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, ...

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. 

  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.

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.

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...

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!

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.

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/ ....

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!

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.

Having discovered Steve Ballmer's new initiative on a podcast, I decided to have a deeper look at his new pet project . Ballmer wants to offer a clear view on public spending, but more specifically a more readable and understandable view of the American public sector spending. Therefore, he funded a (indubitably on Microsoft technologies) web site where every citizen could understand where the money comes from and where it goes . Even if it is not the purpose of my blog to be politically oriented, I was wondering why did we need to have an American billionaire to have those kind of clear and neat reading of what political parties are doing with people's money? Why don't we have the same in Europe? Why is it that every single democratic state can't offer that kind of public information so that the tax payers could understand and follow what happens with the public policies? Why do we even need to make the publicity of this kind of "innovation" when we t...

AI is probably, with Quantum computing, one of the most exciting scientific promise that technology could make to humanity. We all have seen those pictures about the sci-fi mad robot, the super evil system that wanted to control humans etc. but those two frightening examples remain situations that have been imagined by human brains. No more, no less. When it has something to do with pragmatic reality, you can find some interesting intermediate conclusions in the AI100 Stanford University report ( download it right here ). When reading the Exec Sum and the overview of the document, I have to say I was quite impressed by the diversity and the sectors that were listed: Transportation Health care Education Low-resource communities Public safety & security Employment & Workspace Home & Service robots Entertainment And when you think on it, AI has already disrupted all those sectors, today, in our daily life (with a real focus on life improvement, ease of...

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...

Coming back on the previous posts I made about where technology could improve, I believe it's important to anticipate what will change in our private and professional lives. On your personal level, you can already anticipate that IoT and wearable devices will interact to inform you about any specific status. For example, your health (most obvious business cases for the health care sector) - but also about your stress level, your sleep pattern or your attention during a specific period of the day. But that's not all. You could also imagine how the traffic will be once auto-driving cars will be on the road (and that they can stand like 5 centimeters from each other, reducing car accidents or traffic jams etc.) During those car journeys, you will be able to take care of your emails, your presentation or have a video conference call while you're going from one place to another. On a professional level, I'm convinced that every sector in the post-industrial world...