Joël Van Hoolandt — Fractional CTO | Magma Consulting

Commission welcomes agreement to end roaming charges and to guarantee an open Internet   Huge telephone bills ruining your holiday budget, an Internet connection not delivering on its promises: these experiences will be soon old memories. Almost two years after the European Commission put forward its proposal for a telecoms single market, an agreement was found with the European Parliament and the Council. The compromise was reached earlier today following final negotiations between the three institutions (so-called 'trilogue' meetings). It foresees:   The end of roaming charges in June 2017. When travelling in the EU, mobile phone users will pay the same price as at home, with no extra charges. Strong net neutrality rules protecting the right of every European to access Internet content, without discrimination. These measures will be completed by an ambitious overhaul of EU telecoms rules in 2016. This reform will include a more effective EU-level spectru...

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 ...