About my Magma consulting activities

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.

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.

In their last Winter 2018 strategy+business publication , PWC has pointed an interesting 'disrupted' market that is not really going in the expected direction. Most of the time, when tech has impacted traditional businesses, the turnovers of the 'victims' are heavily shaken. Physical media like CD, newspapers, physical video games markets are, year after year, losing value - with an alternate consumption model (streaming, online papers, etc.). Same for hotel, taxi, insurance, banking businesses...  Notable exceptions on this phenomenon are the sales of physical paper books, where according to the authors, the global figures are increasing from $47.8 billion in 2017 to $50.3 billion in 2018. And where it surprises me even more (I fully understand the feeling of 'screen fatigue' when you're at home or on vacation and you want to take a break from the long hours we all spend on our laptops), it is because human beings remain human - and want to have so...

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...

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!

I just read an HBR paper about the new mindset of the CIO (even if you can wonder if human beings are that binary...some projects can be revenue generating and some others are and will remain costs) - transforming a classical cost-centric to a revenue-generating department. One of the most interesting part of the publication are the four areas where CIO's and their corporations are looking for a new market approach: Digital products and business models: This means a shift from selling the equipment that runs a factory, for example, to selling performance information about that equipment along with insight about how to optimize its performance. GE has become a popular exemplar of this, as it leads the way to the digital industrial future. By the end of 2017, revenue growth from information-based products will be double that of the rest of the product/service portfolio for one-third of Global 2000 companies, according to IDC. Digital operations: Transformation of everything...

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...

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...

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 ...

Maybe it's a New Year coincidence, but I see more and more often the question of the sense and the value that pops up. What is that within a consultant's life, the purpose of what we do, as economic entities, is so popular nowadays? Why (in a sudden?) the reason of what we do became so important (not that I ever considered the question as not important, but those topics seem to be more popular today). And, indeed, why and where a consultant can bring value into the society? First, I would argue that value as concept is pretty vague and large; and that even a very small fraction of value should be taken into account (if you want to make the maths). For example, how can we assess the impact of a new corporate governance in a private company? what is the value of my contribution as a board member of a non-profit organization? If you help coordinating the deployment of new technology (conducting change management and adoption of a new product), you increase the level o...

  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...

Currently reading Thinking, Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman , I'm fascinated by the influence of the 'priming' effect (which is, basically, the effect of one idea to another one. Let's pretend you read some words about 'fatigue', 'old age' and 'high temperatures' for example...well, this will conduct you to move and walk slower, for example). What strikes me on the reading is how sensitive we are on contextual (even unconscious) information. Because if you take a serious look at what Kahneman is saying (and his explanation is based on various academic publications), it means that even when you think that you make a coherent, well-thought, rational choice... you're not.   A conclusion that brings me then in my business environment, where we all try (especially as a management consultant) to give best guidance and advices to make the client take the proper and best decision as possible. Decision-making as a process is certainly far fr...

Coming back on the McKinsey report I discussed on my last post, one emerging segment was interesting (well, they all are) - but let's focus on one more specifically, otherwise I don't have anything to say for this month). Being involved in knowledge and IT management for many years now, the section of automation of knowledge work is one of the most challenging. With the emergence of new tools, new programming languages and techniques (what after object-oriented programming?), increased processing power, enhanced connectivity and portability...more than 100 millions FTE's could be impacted). The use of deep learning, neural networks (computers that enable and adapt their own algorithms), we expect huge job shifts (job losses and job creations, with gains in medical sciences, management and professional services [fraud detection, for example]). This is probably underestimated today in the current CIO agenda's, where we're still lacking good and robust informat...

In May 2013, McKinsey Global Institute issued a publication about the major technologies and 'next big things' that our interconnected, worldwide economy could expect. They identified, based on specific criteria, the 12 technologies that would make a significant difference (in our lives, in our economies, in our working habits). Mobile Internet Automation of Knowledge work The Internet of things Cloud Technology Advanced Robotics Autonomous vehicle Next generation genomics Energy storage 3D printing Advanced materials Advanced oil & gas exploration and recovery Renewable energy And, based on this selection, I believe that the daily life of the Chief Information Officer (Chief Innovation, CTO, the title does not really matters here) will be tremendously impacted by some of this. If we consider the evolution of...

Norton has released, for the fourth edition, a cyber security report. What I like in this reading is the readability and the clean facts that it delivers. For example, it is quite striking that victims of cyber criminality activities are located in Russia and China (slightly different than being at the origin of some attacks). And we have interesting stats, like that 50% of surveyed adults have been already facing some cyber crime threats... You can get the full report right here .

While reading the McKinsey Big data report ( that’s a worth reading one,you can find the document right here ), some questions popped in my mind regarding the concrete use of ‘big technology’ (and not only the produced data) in the consulting world really means. For example, having attended the HP Discover 2014 Conference, there are some highly impacting technologies that will radically transform our economy (and that’s the kind of slogan you will read in every management business book). But the remaining question is ‘HOW’? In the ‘Big technologies’, we should include what we call nowadays ‘disruptive’ technologies, being cloud computing (but what's the real, concrete shift for Small and Medium Enterprises for example? Is the cloud really changing the way the SME’s will operate on their markets?); big data might change tremendously marketing and client prospection, especially when public data sets will be made available (and we could imagine the setup of open, public ...

Being back from a nice vacation, I could only remember the landscapes, the visited places and the impression of beauty those left in my mind (I also read the very inspiring Off to the Side: A Memoir of Jim Harrison (2002), that I warmly recommend). And then you come back to work, Internet, wifi, civilization. I could not prevent me for comparing the quality of information, of action and (most important) reflection I had during those two periods. What is striking is the loss of time, the (really) poor quality on what we read online, what is blogged (and you can consider this as being part of that eRubbish) and what we really do with that information we gather the whole day long. Digging into the subject, and if you like going back to in-depth analysis, understanding the impact of disruption on your mind, on your work, on your judgement, I strongly recommend to go to (yeah, I know. I'm full of contradictions) the site of Rolf Dobelli and download his article on Ne...