About my Magma consulting activities

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...

Disruption of the classical models will create 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 value starts at the inception of the business model. A startup is now Internet-based, in an optimal resource utilization perspective, focused on a circular vision of its economic model. Renting cheap office (if any), using collaborative and virtual spaces - and renting all what it needs. This means very poor or low capital intensive businesses, with a strong profit margin if the costs are tightly controled. 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, decision, movement in the busines...

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...

In my previous post about disruption in the banking industry, I explained why banking business was under the heavy pressure of the disruptive technology (low or zero cost operations; software enabled investment decisions; crowd-funding possibilities and no bank business in between). Another important sector where technology will create value is the health care sector. And besides the obvious self-diagnostic tools (fingerprints on a sugar analysis tablet; blood tracking applications etc.) where the patient will be asked to send his results via the Internet, software intelligence will do the rest. And apart diagnostic tools, we have already today some optimization logics and processes where you can improve, let's say, bed occupancy. Or, when you need to squeeze time on the preparation of surgery blocks, there are solutions for aiming at a greater efficiency of those existing, and often expensive, assets. And that's where computers are good at...

  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...