Over the past year and a half, our lives have become more digital than ever before. A huge number of people have been working from home, attending online classes and looking at countless photos and videos on social media. Passwords are essential for all those platforms and channels, and that has caused a new phenomenon: password anxiety. Fortunately, it is something that is easily remedied.

Disruptive conditions, due to external circumstances, require a fundamental digital change. In our  #AENextNormal blog series Stef Devos talked about Accelerating Digital Business with Human Technology, or how people and society will seek a new equilibrium that will be created by a shift towards human technology. To create this shift, data science and artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in automating complex interactions.

These days, achieving true operational excellence is impossible without a thorough understanding of your processes and how they relate to the needs of your staff or customers. Lean processes mean elimination of unnecessary work, reducing errors and focusing on what is really important. It is key to keep costs under control and to level production and service up to speed.

Being truly operational excellent requires, apart from the deep understanding of your processes, a grasp of the constraints and prerequisites they are subject to. Operational excellence is all about having a collaborative focus on your customer’s needs, keeping team members positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace. Effective workforce planning, well organized supply chain operations, preventing production lines from breaking down, efficient use of infrastructure, keeping energy consumption under control, workplace safety… Just to name a few examples.

At AE, we deliver analytics projects on a daily basis and as a result we can experience from the front row that data-driven companies simply perform better than others. As data experts, we can all understand that “data is the new oil” and to put this philosophy into practice we have developed a unique data-driven innovation method to define your next best data product. Sounds interesting right?

Despite the enthusiasm for the digital transformation to a digital manufacturing future, two out of three companies piloting digital manufacturing solutions fail to move into large-scale rollout (Industry Week). Our experience learned us there are 3 dimensions to consider in your journey:

1. Business Dimension
2. Technological Dimension
3. Organisational Dimension

The technological dimension of course is the one considered in most cases. And it is the enabler to a smart factory indeed. However, fail to balance technological actions with a clear focus on business goals, or to embed this new technology into your organisation and the people working in it, and you’re guaranteed not to meet your goals.

What’s one of the most positive things to come out of the COVID-19 lockdown we’ve all found ourselves in across the world? For organizations, it’s how their teams have been organizing themselves to keep their performance level up while not working physically together day after day. Many teams have even managed to increase their efficiency whilst facing whole new challenges, such as helping their kids do schoolwork or simply keeping them busy and entertained.

The COVID-19 crisis has the world working from home, in improvised office spaces. Evidently, this sudden change comes with numerous challenges. Confident that teleworking will continue to play an important role in the post COVID-19 era, AE has kickstarted Awaere, a digital platform that helps remote teams deal with the challenges of telework in various ways.

We interviewed AE Consultants Wim Van Emelen and Joris Hias to learn more about the story behind this innovative platform.

Although there are many ways to fill in an enterprise architect position in your organization, it is often associated with strategic and long-term planning rather than intervening on an operational level during a crisis. Stef Devos, Director Portfolio Management at AE, explains how Enterprise Architecture and Crisis Management go hand in hand during this crisis.

At AE, gaining progressive insights has always been a driver for our business. Yet decisions have never seemed to be overtaken by time so quickly as they are now.

On Thursday March 12 the coronavirus crisis exploded in Belgium. That same day, a team of AE innovation experts started to explore how technology could help prevent COVID-19 contamination among colleagues.

Fires in Australia, floods in Venice, windstorms in Flanders and rising sea levels all over the world: there is no doubt in most people’s minds that the recent natural disasters are not just a random series of events. Yet we still tend to forget that climate change concerns each of us, demanding concrete actions and investments from nations, organizations and citizens alike. The task at hand is definitely not an easy one, but here’s the upside: climate change and the need to lower CO₂-emissions in particular spark entrepreneurship, drive research and innovation, and even create new jobs (albeit it in other domains than the traditional ones). If successfully tapped into, the war on climate change will lead to better and healthier lives for all. But where to start? No worries. We got this!

In 2019, AE joined the IO.Energy Ecosystem, an initiative meant to facilitate new energy services through customer centricity. While most energy players know all too well that putting the customer at the center of the organization and adapting your strategy accordingly is what customer centricity is all about, a lot of them struggle putting the idea into practice. For those organizations, switching to the Maka approach can work wonders.

Major changes are in store for the electricity grid. On the one hand, there is the fast-growing variable production of renewable energy, including solar and wind, to be reckoned with. On the other hand, more and more technical applications (e.g. electric vehicles, heat pumps, …) require a considerable amount of energy and have very specific demand patterns. The consequences of these evolutions are mostly felt in three segments of the electricity market: electricity supply, balance maintenance and network congestion. As the need for flexible means to match supply and demand continues to increase, all eyes are now on innovative initiatives such as the Flux50 ICON project.

In December 2019, Cloudbrew took place in Mechelen (Belgium). Hosted by the AZUG user group and proudly sponsored by AE, Cloudbrew is an annual – and free – two-day cloud conference that focuses on all things Microsoft Azure. This year’s edition saw Koen Verbeeck, one of our very own consultants, take to the stage with a session on ‘Moving Data around in Azure’, in which he explored some of the various methods of moving data from one service to another. Did you miss out on the event? Not to worry. In this blog post, we gladly summarize Koen’s findings for you!

When the AE team flew to Barcelona to attend the Gartner Symposium, we could not help but feel a nerdy giddiness thinking of all the technological marvels, forecasts and hacks the yearly summit would likely have in store for us. Indeed, Gartner did not disappoint.

At AE, we have set up a 'garage' initiative as a community for working with emerging technology. Luckily for us, it’s not a boring empty box for cars to park, but a creative space with all kinds of hardware to experiment with. One of the goals with this garage initiative is to gain hands-on experience with new tech, like computer vision with neural networks for example. An important aspect of this is that it is an open community for all colleagues to collaborate and elaborate on ideas. So, the myth of the AE Garage begins!

Many consumers find their energy consumption – not to mention the bill that comes with it – a hard pill to swallow. ‘Is this normal for a family our size? How can I reduce my energy usage to the absolute minimum?’, they wonder. Indeed, a great deal of consumers today are unaware of the steps they can take to minimize the amount of energy they use. To them, saving energy seems to be a luxury reserved for people who can afford to invest in solar panels, water pumps and other pricy measures. But now there is Maka, the platform that puts the energy-conscious consumer back in the driver’s seat no matter their budget.

Knowledge makes the world go round. Therefore, the key question for every company that still wants to be in the race tomorrow is: how can we keep our employees – and the valuable knowledge they possess – on board for as long as possible? But implementing an effective retention policy is no easy feat. After all, a happy employee is someone who feels they can develop their talents to their heart's content – a sore point for most organizations.

Team Lotus felt it was time to make some changes during the AE Hackathon See/d the future! 

Dreaming of a way to deploy technology to let children cycle to school safely, BAM Belgium and AE recently joined forces. The result of this interesting collaboration? Read all about Allride, an innovative platform that allows youngsters to map their route to school by means of a smart bicycle lamp and/or an app.

Last week our Transformation & Innovation experts co-facilitated the Hack Utilities event at Brussels, a 2-day innovation event for the utilities sector organised by Hack Belgium Labs. During these two days they guided the participants from brainstorm to team formation, business model validation and finally pitching their ideas.

Why RegTech matters

RegTech is a commonly used term to indicate “the use of new technology to meet regulatory requirements”. These requirements are becoming more and more complex due to the fact that it concerns more functionality, available on all platforms, using massive amounts of data.

A heart for young-onset dementia

In Belgium, more than 200,000 people suffer from dementia. Another 1,500 are diagnosed with young-onset dementia. As the number of patients in need of care increases, the pressure on care providers is higher than ever. Having been made personally aware of the issue by a colleague who lost her husband to young-onset dementia, the people working at KBC were quick to learn that extra support is especially needed at times when patients are home alone. Hence, in this year’s edition of the AE Hackathon Team KBC Humaen set out to find a solution that would both enable (young) demented patients to live at home for a longer period of time and relieve their caregivers.

In my previous blog I explained why it is important for any organisation to think about its ecosystem and develop a platform strategies. I’ve dived deeper into the two main platform strategies. Developing a strategy is one thing, at least as challenging it is, to implement it and secure one’s position in the platform business of the future.

If you ask yourself why companies like Google, Amazon and Apple are so successful, it is because they were the first to understand about platform strategies and how to best implement them.

Last week our Innovation experts were present at Hack Belgium 2019, a 3 day innovation event in Brussels. During these 3 days people had the opportunity to visit our booth, follow our workshops and get hands-on coaching to develop their idea.

Last time I talked about whether corporations should start acting like start-ups. This week, we'll discuss our incubation process and how corporations can include some of the best ideas of start-ups in their own organisation without throwing the company child out with the bathwater.

90% of the people we have interviewed indicated that their organization’s innovation capability is hampered by a lack of speed and flexibility. It’s tempting to look at start-ups (and how they organize themselves) in an attempt to copy their strengths to your large corporate organization. Heck, even some consultancy firms will state that corporates should act as start-ups in order to achieve success in their innovation efforts. We disagree and I would like to share our vision on the matter.

The banking landscape is changing fast paced. It forces all of us to rethink fundamentally the way we serve and create value for our customers. Making the right decisions to remain relevant for your customers in the future, is a challenge and requires a mindset and approach adapted to the rapidly changing environment. Organizations can no longer afford to “get all sorted out” before “making the move”. Standing still is going backwards and involves risks, but so does innovating without the right framework and approach.

Last year has been quite exciting, full of wonderful events and the joyful welcoming of a few new members to our AE family. Before we said goodbye to the year of 2018, we held our end-of-year Analytics foyer in December.

During this festive edition, our team of Data Scientists shared a number of different success stories we realised together with our customers in 2018. In our previous blog post Looking Back at our Analytics foyer: Part 1, we presented a deep dive into these different successes brought during this inspiring evening.

Last year was an important one for our financial services community. In 2018, having built up expertise in finance for over fifteen years, AE decided to enter the financial market with a focused service offer. Our ambition to become a trustworthy end-to-end digital partner translated into a brand-new, sector-driven website and a bi-monthly newsletter. So let’s look back on the amazing things we’ve accomplished in 2018, and cast a glance at what 2019 has in store for us! 

Our Analytics foyer took place last Tuesday. At this festive end-of-year edition, we’ve proudly welcomed 79 attendees to conclude 2018 together. It became an interesting afternoon and evening during which the public was introduced to several customer cases and the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Our take home message? Analytics turns data into useful insights that take your business to a higher level.

Innovation … A word used and misused so often that we can safely speak of a cliché. We hear and read success stories on Twitter and LinkedIn, and various hip events around innovation compete for the most attention. At the same time, we also hear stories from behind the scenes of companies that want to innovate. And those stories turn out to be a lot less rosy than is sometimes portrayed. To separate facts from fiction around the theme of innovation, we started talking to a number of companies about their challenges. We spoke to people from 14 organisations, spread across 5 sectors, and were able to test 10 assumptions.

In-memory columnstore databases are all the rage nowadays. But did you know SQL Server already used them back in 2012? The release of SQL Server 2012 introduced columnstoreindexes to the SQL Server database engine for the first time ever. Borrowing technology from the Power Pivot engine (now found in Power BI), these indexes drastically improve the performance of large analytical queries – exactly the kind of queries used in data warehouses.

At AE Financial Services we try to keep up with the various trends in our rapid changing landscape. Looking back at the various conferences which we attended in the last few months, it appears that the search for authenticity and human relevance in this digital world remains top on the agenda.

Seth Godin, one of the speakers at Supernova at the end of September, was probably the one who best summarized this quest for a human connection in his presentation in a few striking quotes:

The world we live in today is highly competitive. Competitors lurk around every corner, customers become increasingly demanding and new technologies are able to devour your existing business model. Knowledge, and - even more importantly - sharing it, are essential in such times. Organisations and people who learn faster and more efficiently take the pole position.

Equally within AE the acquisition and sharing of knowledge is important. There are several different ways to do this. In this blog post, we introduce you into how we creatively tackled this in our financial service community via an in-house crypto competition.

Before the end of 2019, financial players must be compliant with the Payment Services Directive II. Commonly referred to as PSD2, the European directive concerns the development of new products and payment services, as well as their inclusion in a legal framework. Johan Luyts, Integration Expert at AE, discusses the changes this new payment directive brings about and elaborates on strategies banks can use to turn those challenges into opportunities.

Let’s talk about innovation... How does this word make you feel nowadays? Do you feel confident as in “I’ve got this”, or do you feel shivers rolling down your spine? Well, more often than not, it seems that it is the latter. How come?

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants. 

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants. 

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants.

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants.

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants. 

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth editionof the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants. 

June 2018 marked the fifth edition of the AE Hackathon, which challenges customers and prospects to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product within 36 hours. This series puts each participating team in the spotlight.

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants.

The AE Hackathon gives customers and prospects 36 hours to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viableproduct. The fifth edition of the Hackathon took place in June 2018. In this series, you will meet all the participants. 

June 2018 marked the fifth edition of the AE Hackathon, which challenges customers and prospects to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product within 36 hours. This series puts each participating team in the spotlight.

June 2018 marked the fifth edition of the AE Hackathon, which challenges customers and prospects to come up with an innovative idea and a minimum viable product within 36 hours. This series puts each participating team in the spotlight.

A few weeks ago we attended the Connected Insurance Summit in London. In the heart of London City, we encountered a modest gathering of 200 guests varying from insurance companies over services providers to insurTech vendors.

Our intentions were ambitious. On one hand we were excited to be inspired by the vibes and implementations of the insurTech companies present. On the other hand, we were looking forward to gain insights on the vision and initiatives of the leading European insurance companies towards their digital transformation

 The missions we captured were slightly disjunct and often lacked consistency and co-thinking.

Early June, the Money2020 circus landed in Amsterdam. One should take this literally since “circus” was the major theme for this year’s European edition of the Greatest FinTech Show on Earth, as the organizers themselves tend to call this event.

With stellar speakers and panels on 8 different stages for 3 days long and a buzzing expo hall with over 250 start-ups, scale-ups and mature corporates presenting their services, wrapping up the take-aways is a challenge.

Let me share the 5 quotes that resonated the most to me.

A few weeks ago, the FINOVATE EUROPE 2018 was held in London, a major event for everyone who wants to stay abreast of the main challenges, new business models and innovative technologies in the financial sector.

Our colleagues Patrick Van den Broeck and Frederick Beernaert traveled to London to scout out the latest trends and new technologies for us, and love to share their findings.

In today’s world, change is omnipresent in and around companies. They are forced to simplify or improve business processes in order to maintain their competitive position and to promote customer centricity. A company in full transformation needs to pay sufficient attention to change management. If there is a sudden reorganisation and a new way of working is to be implemented, it is hardly surprising that employees will jam on the brakes. In this blog post, we will share our best practices for change management outlining a real example of a similar situation at one of our customers in the financial sector.

AE and Ericsson engage in a partnership to bring the 5G capabilities to their customers.

5G is the next evolution of mobile connectivity. We started out with 2G, which allowed people to have massive mobile communication. With its successor 3G, we saw the introduction of mobile broadband and feature phones. With 4G these became smartphones and we saw mobile data traffic increase. And finally, in the next step with 5G, both consumers and industry will be served with solutions ranging from massive low-cost, low-energy applications, to high end, ultra-reliable applications.

Companies are currently in the middle of a major digital transformation. Being able to quickly respond to new customer needs and expectations is crucial. Consequently, project teams are being organised differently. For example, more and more SCRUM teams are being put together to provide software more agilely. However, a question I’ve been asked by customers repeatedly concerns the place that architecture must be given within this story. My opinion is that a minimum of architecture is always necessary. Just enough, just in time. In this blog post, I want to illustrate a technique, based on a previous project, that lets you gain a helicopter view with a minimum amount of enterprise architecture, which is something that is unarguably adding value for a company that is going through a complex transformation.

Imagine, you are working with an enthusiastic team to make your product skyrocket. Each iteration you are adding a few features and information to complete your product. But suddenly, you notice a drop in conversion rates. Your customers are raising a bunch of support questions, are not converting anymore and give you poor usability grades. You are left confused. Although you gave your customers more tools and information to fulfill their tasks, their performance declines. Indeed, you are diagnosed with featuritis.

This post was written by Oliver Belmans & Bram Vanschoenwinkel

A previous series of blog posts on Marketing Analytics offered an extensive overview of the available analytical techniques for marketing and their added value. Some examples of these techniques included market basket analysis, customer segmentation and churn prediction. A conclusion reached in these blog posts was that data analytics are the ideal extension to traditional marketing: based on data, we gain insights into (potential) customers and their behaviour, so that we can target them in an even more personalised manner.

The first of a two-part blog post zooms in on an important category of marketing analytics: Geospatial analytics or Geographic analysis. What can geographic analysis signify for your business? What is the added value of using this analysis? In a second blog post, we will explain the more technical aspects, show you how you can start up this analysis with the help of the open-source software R (the R Project for Statistical Computing) and provide a complete step-by-step plan of our own workflow.

This blog post was written by Ruben Vuylsteke & Christophe Bonduelle.

Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, IoT, etc. are hot topics in our environment. To learn more, we visited the ABISS (Advanced Business & Industrial Software Summit) trade fair held on Thursday 5 October at the XPO in Kortrijk. Throughout the day, the questions at the back of our minds were: “What can AE signify for these companies?” and “What does AE still have to learn to become relevant to these companies?” Finding answers to these questions requires further thought but before that, here is our report of this extremely interesting day!

The annual conference of the Business Architecture Guild -  a BAR professional association known for the BIZBOK® Guide - took place in Brussels this year. We visited the event and learned about the importance of BAR, or Business Architecture. BAR is a relatively new discipline, which is still in search of uniformity and recognition. What is Business Architecture exactly and how is it implemented in practice? What is the added value of BAR and how can you convince the C-level management of this? We gathered different opinions during the conference and examined the best practices.

The gigantic technological evolution of the latest years provided us with a lot of cool gadgets. These gadgets are not only fun to play with, they have underused potential to become the answers to huge challenges our society faces. 1 of these challenges is the communication between deaf and hearing people. During our Hackathon, we developed a platform to unite them.

It's an eternal clash that comes to mind when building information models: should we allow attributes in our conceptual information models? Should we plead for simplicity, or is a complex model based on the stakeholder a better choice? This blog post aims to bring clarity to the discussion, before the clash results in a total loss.

When it comes to logging execution information in Integration Services, there are multiple options available. Do you take matters in your own hands and build your own custom logging framework? Or do you let the catalog take care of things?

Can't decide? Check out our guidelines and tips on logging in your SSIS packages and projects.

This blog focuses on the role of the business analyst within a data migration project. In our experience, this role is often underestimated within the migration context and that is why we want to take this opportunity to highlight some best practices. We will illustrate these best practices using one of our current migration projects: the migration as part of the Atrias project.

IoT is hot! IoT is a business enabler offering enormous value potential! IoT will soon become a trillion dollar market! IoT startups are disrupting entire industries! Act now or be disrupted! 

In a  big data world, data-driven decisions and Internet of Things, Analytics is often needed to acquire data insights. However, when data scientists forget to use visualizations to communicate or explore information they are missing out on a valuable tool.

I’m not telling you something new if I say the demands on IT from business are ever increasing. Certainly the last few years, business is looking more and more towards IT as a big part of the solution to their business problems.

In consultancy we often talk about the difference between having an educated opinion on the one hand and getting your opinion accepted on the other. In short, it’s the difference between ‘being right’ and others saying that you are and taking positive action because of it. When you know how to convince the person on the other side of the table of your opinion, you’ll find that it will positively affect the deployment of your hard skills.

At AE, Vincent Guelinckx is one of the strongest proponents of the development of a wide range of soft skills, not in the least because these skills form the basis of real, value-based consultancy.

For utilities, the foundation of the energy marketplace is changing. Increasingly, business models and operational approaches of the past are being stretched to their limits and a tipping point has been reached.

What does this mean for energy providers looking to remain successful in the future?

On April 14, 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679) was formally accepted by the European Parliament. In the summer of 2018, this new regulation will replace all national data protection laws and regulations.

Together with a large organization, we’re building a platform that presents company data to its data scientists so they can use it to develop innovative applications.

In most application landscapes services tend to pop up like mushrooms, with little to no attention being devoted to decent service design or decent service-oriented architecture (SOA). Frankly put, this means you’re doing it wrong.

Every month at AE, we organize an AE Codecamp for our colleagues' children and their friends. It's a great way for the next generation to experience the possibilities of science and technology in a playful manner.

For finance companies that often execute international payments and transactions, it’s worth looking at Blockchain, a technology that simplifies the payment and transaction process significantly.

One of the major shifts that I see happening in the digital transformation journey is the shift in thinking from applications to platforms.

A common issue encountered on projects is that the project goals have not been clearly defined. A Benefit Map is a powerful visual to provide solace.

The world around us is moving at an ever faster pace and disrupting forces for your market are lurking around the corner.

Why does Value Driven Transformation form the biggest challenge for Utilities in Belgium over the next few years? Because every party involved is facing a transformation, spurred by the enormous changes the market is about to face.

The energy market in Belgium is about to experience an important change. The creation of a federal clearing House, Atrias, and the introduction of a new market communication standard (MIG6.0) are bringing a lot of new concepts and challenges for every market party. Luckily, change always heralds new opportunities.

Having a solid, clear strategy is vital if you want to keep your business armed for the future. But having a strategy is just the first step, because it won’t lead anywhere if it’s not supported or properly executed by the people in your organization. That’s where Value Driven Transformation comes in.

The weekend is great for catching up on some reading backlog. Missed a blog post? Don’t worry. We’re here to help you out. Customer experience is an essential part in creating and operating a successful business or offering. Whether you’re providing services to external clients or support colleagues in other business units, a customer-centric approach helps you provide true value.

This is the last post in a series of three about the added value of Analytics in Marketing. The first post, by my colleague Bram Vanschoenwinkel, gave an overview of a number of Analytics techniques tailored to a better understanding of your customers and their specific needs. Jessica Ruelens discussed Customer Segmentation & Profiling and a specific case for a company that sells professional training seminars in a second post. I will conclude this series with a discussion about Churn Prediction and a specific case of a bank.

Have you ever wondered how your customers are behaving on a grand scale? Do you know which customers are most valuable to you and which customers represent an undiscovered opportunity? You might have a general idea about the behaviour of your customers - having observed their behaviour in the past - but are you sure your observations are supported by the facts or the data?

In my last blog post I talked about the strategic and competitive advantages that can be delivered by Business Analytics but that a lot of companies are still struggling to apply Analytics and actually gain these advantages. This post is the first in a series of three where the added value of Analytics in Marketing will be discussed.

Summer is great for catching up on some reading backlog. Missed a blog post? Don’t worry! We’re here to help you out. These past months our front end engineering community has been very active in implementing web technologies across our customer base. Want to get started with the latest web technologies in your project?

This blog post is part 2 of our hackathon idea. It covers the technical setup we used to get the prototype up and running during the two-day hackathon at AE. You can read about the concept idea in part 1.

On the 4th and 5th of June, AE organized a hackathon for all interested employees. We were invited to gather a team and work out our own idea based on the theme "Think customer, explore the future". Our team: 4 developers and 1 analyst. This blog post describes our idea and how we implemented this in under 36 hours.

Making your web applications Search Engine Friendly has always been important for scoring high in search engine results. More and more of those front end applications are evolving towards SPA's (Single Page App) which are inherently difficult to crawl, thereby potentially impacting your search ranking. However, the dilemma between a focus on UX or SEO is a fallacy. In this post we’ll have a look at how you can both offer a dynamic, fast and user-friendly web application and still keep search engine crawlers happy.

There are a lot of buzzwords around Information Management these days. Carlo Wouters helps you get a clear view on the value of your data and its untapped potential in these 5 Questions and the June 10th AE Foyer.

Do you know what your application is doing? Is it happily crunching along or is it slowly getting consumed in a blazing ball of fire? In the age of services, not every application has a UI to show you the screen of death. How is your application being used? Are you missing opportunities or is traffic so slow that it's best to shut it down before you get your cloud bill?

According to wikipedia, the amount of unstructured data might account for more than 70%-80% of all data in organisations. Because everyone wants to find hidden treasures in these mountains of information, new tools for processing, analyzing and visualizing data are being developed continually.

Building a profitable enterprise no longer depends on finding the right product and setting the right price. We live in the age of the customer, who is well informed through the capabilities of the internet. Customer Experience has become an important element in doing good business. Companies will have to reinvent themselves in order to fully understand and serve their customers, employees and partners. Time to get started on building amazing experiences, aided by digital tools. We spoke with Kenny Follet, one of the speakers at AE's latest AE Foyer "Embrace your customer, get digital!"

“How do you feel about that?” It’s a question associated more with clients staring at their psychotherapist’s office ceiling than with enterprise platforms, mobile applications and their customers. Not surprisingly so; applications are often seen as embodiments of reason and logic. Their performance has objective targets and their functionalities have thoroughly analysed and well-documented requirements.

Do you recognize the following situation? You are involved in a project and, based on a slide deck or analysis document, you need to decide on the way to go. After reading the content, you don’t feel like you’ve fully grasped it and you don’t feel comfortable at all to take a decision. In this article, I’d like to share 3 practical tips to increase the value of any change/requirements document, enabling faster and more confident decision taking for stakeholders.

A Q&A with Brigitte Narmon, lead of the AE Utilities Community, about the challenges of the Belgian energy sector and how AE prepares for this (r)evolution?

2014

Last year in May, we launched our new AE Blog. We want to thank our 4.000+ readers who spent on average two and a half minutes on our blog per session. Of course this wouldn't have been possible without the hard work of our authors, the AE employees who created over 50 posts for you to read. A big 'thank you' to them as well.

HTML5 Introduces a variety of new possibilities for the web. One of those is the ability to make a website available offline. Adding these features to web sites bridges the gap between the native and web world. A comparison between web and native development is outside the scope of this post.

Wikipedia: “A Deadly Sin: a Sin that is the origin of other sins or vices.”

So we have analysed the customer's journey, looking not only at the different steps our customer goes through, but also how he feels along the way. We've also checked the different touch points the customer interacts with and identified gaps or points for improvement. Useful techniques that help us better serve the customer. But one question is left untouched: does the customer care?

A few weeks ago I participated in a hackathon organised by AE. We began friday morning and by saturday night we had to present our idea and demo our product. Our team consisted of four awesome technical wizards: @thomaux, @glenndejaeger, @piether and Alex Wauters. As you might guess, I was the analyst.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about organizing a hackathon as a great way to discover, support or highlight new and innovative ideas in your company. Valerie also wrote about her experiences at AE’s first hackathon. In the coming weeks, you’ll get to know some of the teams and their projects a bit better. They’ll share their experiences, design choices and technical implementation. Today we want to show you how our colleagues at AE spent their 48 hours and what their major takeaways were.

It’s Monday morning and the daily scrum just took place. An analyst got the task to dig into a problem. He eagerly starts working on it at his desk, digging deep into the issue trying to make it crystal clear. Doing everything he can; creating diagrams, modeling, drawing, … Putting in time and effort. The analyst goes to the developer’s desk to discuss the fruits of his labor. While going through the entire stack of documents, he figures out that all he needed were some quick sketches on a the back of beer coaster. So where did he go wrong?

The experience of two restaurant visits from last month stuck with me. In the first one jackhammers were constantly interrupting our conversation because they were rebuilding the place. In the second one, I was sitting on a terrace, in a beautiful late-summer sun. One of those restaurants however will never see me again. Guess which one?

Last month, AE organized its first hackathon. For two days, seven teams worked feverishly towards the realisation of their idea. At stake was a €2000 reward for the winning team. Despite the simplicity of this concept, a hackathon is not just a game. Moreover, it proved to be an efficient way to leverage innovation, creativity and knowledge sharing.

In my previous post and related article, I explained how I believe customer journeys can be used to guide strategic investments. Customer journeys can help you find out where and how your organisation can improve the long term customer experience. Armed with that knowledge, you can then define the required change projects.

AngularJS is one of the most popular, complete and advanced HTML frameworks of the moment. Recently, the first Angular conference in Europe – ng-europe – took place in Paris. My colleague Thomas Anciaux and I attended it and in this post I will highlight the most important takeaways.

A while ago, I published an article in the IRM UK newsletter on business process modelling. In the article, I explain the value of and relation between different kinds of process models. I also propose to use customer journeys to guide strategic choices and investments in process (and other) improvements. In this post, I briefly summarise the key messages of the article and elaborate on how to use customer journeys as a guide for your strategic investments.

My colleague Glenn Dejaeger and I recently visited the Fronteers 2014 conference. It was the first time we attended, but it surely will not be the last. The organization was impeccable, the venue wonderful and the talks interesting. Although there wasn't an overall theme, there were some recurring topics, which I have listed in this post.

How do you get the attention of your audience in a requirements workshop? By synthesizing your main messages in a clear format. That format, in essence, is a drawing.

Why doesn’t my product sell online Tom? I’ve done everything by the book! I created a nice shop; I’ve added a lot of fancy pictures and good descriptions. People can pay online via Paypal and credit card and shipping is done in a jiffy. Amount sold last month: zero, nada, nothing, not even a pennie. Please Tom, what am I doing wrong?

In the last 5 years of my career as an enterprise architect, whenever the word "integration" came up, discussions started about the choice of an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), FTP or web services, SOAP or REST, XML or JSON, etc.
In short, when involved in discussions about "integration", one most likely finds himself drowning in a multitude of technical acronyms and technological standards.

I compare the technological side of integration to the "Dr. Jekyll" personality : it is the side well-known to everyone, stable, under control and increasingly complying to uniform standards.

In the end, Application Lifecycle Management helps you to transform business ideas in an efficient and predictable way. You, as an IT department, will be able to deliver what the business needs. Moreover, you will be able to do this on time and within the estimated budget. The ALM maturity assessment discussed in my previous post results in a clear overview of the current maturity level (per discipline) and a phased plan to increase the maturity of you ALM processes. In this post we will discuss the possible benefits of executing an ALM maturity increase plan (by using a concrete customer case).

In my previous post I have shown a number of possible pain patterns that you can experience if the maturity of your ALM processes is not adequate. In this post we will discuss a method that can be used to assess these processes and increase the ALM maturity in the areas where this is needed.

ALM

The actual goal of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is to transform a business idea into working software as efficiently as possible. The requirements need to be aligned with development to build applications that drive business objectives.

Your ALM processes should be managed as actual business processes because they create the predictability that the business is requesting.

In reality they are still considered to be an IT internal concern.

Pain patterns

Do you recognize any of the following pain patterns?

You've probably already heard of Scrum, the popular agile software development framework. While the basics aren't difficult, a lot of people seem to fail implementing it. In this post I'll sum up 10 things you should do if you want your Scrum project to fail miserably.

1. No or bad retrospectives

   
   

I have frequently started working on products where there was little up-to-date documentation. You usually only notice it as you go. You might find that one part of the analysis does not describe the latest changes. As you find more and more inconsistencies, you will not be able to trust any of the documentation, even though some of it might still be ok. So why does this happen?

How does documentation become out of date and what can be done to prevent it?

Ultimately, society as a whole and business in particular are all about relationships. Then, success - or in the more personal area, happiness - is measured by how well one can establish and maintain personal and long-lasting relationships.

Within the traditional business context, the primary relationship is usually seen to be that of a company with its customers. But let's turn this around:

The primary business relationship is that of a person with a company of his choice.

Undoubtedly you already heard about the strategic and competitive advantages Business Analytics can deliver by bringing you wisdom and insights derived from your company data.

“Analytics is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”

But is this really the case? Is Analytics really worthwhile talking about? And more importantly, how can companies go from just talking about it to actually and successfully doing it?

You work six months on your ‘perfect’ site. You spend a lot of money on good designers, make it look nice on a smartphone. And then the big day comes, houston, we have liftoff! For it is just after three months later that you realize your site just sits there in a corner wheepin’ because google won’t put it on number one. I too learned it the hard way, and went on a secret mission to make my site score better in Google. Here are 7 quick-wins I’ve encountered on my mission to take over the world (with my tiny fancy site)…

In the context of AE's migration to Office 365, we have been studying legal impact of moving to the cloud. Since a lot of our customers are in the same situation, I wanted to share our findings with all of you via this blog.

Although it is a common assumption that the Patriot Act gives the US unlimited access to your data, the actual impact of the Patriot Act is negligible.

Last week I attended the AE Foyer of Matthias Pyck, "From server virtualization to hybrid cloud". Matthias Pyck is one of the pioneers in the Belgium Cloud scene. This blog takes you through the story of Matthias. Showing you a way to the Cloud.

A few weeks ago Gartner gave an insight of what we can expect in Infrastructure & Operations (I&O):

"By 2017, 50% of I&O teams will be eliminated or have major budget reductions because they are viewed as outdated, high-cost, legacy support organizations."

The conclusion / warning for the I&O teams was:
"Improve or Perish"

Why should you be making this distinction?

If you are not making it, you probably recognize some of these issues:

• you are redescribing your product over and over again for every new project
• there is no documentation of your product as a whole, in stead pieces are described depending on what was relevant for the project
• It is hard to find existing documentation as it is organized per project in stead of per product

In my 3^rd blog on customer centricity, I look at the impact of your customer centric strategy on technology. Since your customer is becoming more and more digital, a customer centric strategy cannot be realized without considering technology. And as customer centric business models are build on dynamic ecosytems connecting different partners, you will not be able to operate without technology.

In fact, business and technology should be considered at the same time and in an integrated way. There is no such thing as business and technology anymore, there is only business. But technology is at the heart of your business model.

In a previous blog I wrote about moving from an organisation centric to a customer centric strategy. In this blog I expand somewhat more on this theme by considering the impact on your business model.

Today’s organisations are typically designed according to a traditional linear value chain of marketing, sales, delivery and support. But if we really want to put the customer central stage, we have to look differently at our organisation model. And turn it around. Make it a dynamic network driven by the needs of our customers.

Back home after an inspiring and entertaining EA & BPM conference (EACBPM). There was way too much going on to wrap it up in a short blog post, but here are some themes that stuck with me after the talks and informal discussions.

Value proposition & strategy

An important part of enterprise and business architecture and business process management is about making the connection with corporate strategy and an enterprise’s value proposition. It will not surprise you that customer experience is playing an important role here. Thinking outside-in, stepping into the customer’s shoes and looking at his process instead of ours is a first step.

In today’s business landscape, almost every company is facing the challenge to move from organisation centric to customer centric, putting the customer at the heart of all activities. In this blog, I explain some of the key changes that I see happening today.

Looking from the outside: start from ‘real’ customer needs

Understanding your customers’ needs and desires and how they interact with your business is key in building long-lasting customer relationships. The major mind shift here is to start from what the customer really needs, instead of what you ‘think’ the customer needs.

A few weeks ago I attended the very first installment of Techorama, a new conference for developers hosted in Mechelen, Belgium. This post will walk you through my experiences of the conference and will highlight the most important takeaways from the various talks I attended.

General impressions

The conference had tracks on ALM, Mobile, Web, Cloud, Language & Tools, Sharepoint & SQL and best-of Build 2014. I mostly attended the Web and ALM tracks since they are most relevant for my current work, but I dabbled in the other tracks here and there. I expected this conference to be heavily Microsoft-oriented but it turned out that there were a lot of non-Microsoft specific talks. As a matter of fact, it would have been entirely possible to schedule your conference without attending a single Microsoft-specific talk. Most of the talks I attended were high-quality presentations. The booth hall had some entertaining side tracks and there was a lot of swag up for grabs. The food was delicious (warm meals instead of the usual sandwiches!). Overall there was a very good vibe during these two days.

You might be a developer like me. You might also wander around in the deep and dark layers of relational database systems. You might've been face to face with this thing some call a composite index.

Why are you talking in this denigrating tone?

Because in the fairly limited experience I have, I have seen some grave cases of index abuse. Of them, badly designed composite indexes - or multi-column indexes - were always the most aggravating ones.

Always inspiring, a seminar by Chris Potts. So I was keen on joining this evening’s EA Café about linking enterprise architecture to enterprise investment. If you haven’t read his books or participated in one of his workshops, I strongly encourage you to do so. Here are some things and questions that stuck with me today.

Business cases are a valuable instrument, but in practice they are not always applied correctly. They are often ‘misused’ in an attempt to get budgets allocated or to win projects. During a most interesting evening with our Business Analysis community, many colleagues presented real-life examples of how business cases are typically used by our customers. It was fascinating to see how the same patterns kept returning again and again.

What’s wrong with business cases?

Someone mentioned that: "You can always calculate your profit with a business case". As a result, business cases become more of a sales instrument for projects instead of a management instrument to evaluate and follow up on investments. And that is a shame, because business cases are extremely useful when applied correctly.

There is a question that often returns: How do we know which analysis techniques we need to apply? There are of course several considerations to be made.

You can for example consider the nature of the system or the composition of the team. One good place to start is to take a look at the stakeholders of your analysis. Whom are you making it for?

Despite agile and lean being more popular than ever, 200 page analysis documents are still very much a reality. There are many reasons why you shouldn’t write this type of documentation but if I would have to choose one major reason it is that nobody actually likes to read these documents. Here are some other good reasons not to.

Inconsistencies

It is hard for anyone to remain consistent throughout a long plain text. Inconsistencies already start creeping in while you’re working on the first version. Then updates are made by you or even more risky, by other people. (If you don’t believe me, just take a look at all the inconsistencies in the Harry Potter series.)

Enterprise architecture, on its own delivers no value. As illustrated in my blog on outside-in architecture, the final goal of enterprise architecture is to design structures that create business value.

Therefore enterprise architects operate on the link between strategy and execution, connecting the investment chain with the operational value chain. To be able to improve the structure of enterprises, enterprise architects have to collaborate with business executives, investment portfolio managers, project teams and operational people as illustrated in the following picture:

In this blog I want to share my insights on how I see these collaborations happening in practice. Be aware that I will explain the collaborations top down, which in practice will often not be the case. In my experience, I mostly jump in at the project level to create early value and continue my journey from there on.

In response to my previous blog someone drew my attention to an article published a year ago by Ron Tolido: “De Dood van Requirements” (the death of requirements). The author foresees a brighter future if we stop thinking in terms of requirements, a future where ict and business collaborate in such a way that there is no longer a need to specify requirements.

It is a compelling vision. Traditionally, requirement elicitation and management consumed an inordinate amount of time and effort. So instead of just trying to speed things up, elimination seems a valid cure.

As an enterprise architect, I ask myself continuously the question how I can contribute to the creation of business value for the enterprise. How can we design or improve structures that enable the enterprise to create more value?

The basic model

If we look at an enterprise from a very high level, the basic model of an enterprise is to turn the money of investors in business value for customers, in collaboration with partners in the supply chain.

If we want to take the word ‘enterprise’ in our job titles seriously, I believe we should change our mental model from an inside-out oriented perspective to an outside-in oriented perspective. How can we connect the investment value chain with the operational value chain to create more value for the customer?

Ever since user stories were introduced to the world they have been compared to use cases. There has been a small war between the agilists promoting user stories and the “mainstream analysts” holding on to their use cases. But is all this rivalry really necessary?

When comparing use cases and user stories, they turn out to be different in every way:

• Use cases can be used as permanent documentation, User stories are thrown away at the end of the iteration
• Use cases are at the level of what the user is trying to achieve with the system, User stories are small enough to plan into an iteration and to iteratively and incrementally deliver value
• Use cases are a base for high level preliminary estimations, User stories are a base for development estimates

So to me they simply serve different purposes

 

In every requirements management effort there is a moment when the seemingly inevitable question comes up: “Are we talking about business requirements or IT requirements”. Other taxonomies are in use - the BABOK lists 5 levels- , this specific question seems to be triggered by whom should own and validate which requirements.

I will not discuss the role issue but I will demonstrate a clear distinction between business requirements and IT requirements. The answer boils down to dependencies.

In this post I will summarize some of the main principles of Jez Humble and David Farley’s great book on Continuous Delivery and share my experiences of applying them on software projects I’ve been involved in. First, I’d like to share a story to give this discussion some context.

Meet Joe

Joe is a software developer. It’s a regular Friday afternoon, 15 PM. Before heading home, Joe has to start this thing called a “weekly build”. Joe makes sure everyone on the team has checked in their changes to the source control system.

Joe starts the fully-automated build at the click of a button. The current build process takes some time, so he grabs a coffee. Five minutes later Joe returns to his computer, only to be shocked by what his monitor is displaying:

build failed.

The twentieth BAEA Café was once again very inspiring. Koen Knaepen, known from the COSTA model, talked about how your approach to modelling may help or impede business architecture from improving an enterprise. Tom Graves (twitter, blog, Café slides) moved enterprise architecture’s focus away from IT and towards people. This blog contains some take aways from this seminar.

Keep it simple

Plenty architecture models and frameworks try to capture as much as possible from reality. As a consequence, they become far too complex. In the end, only the creators understand these models. First and foremost however, a model should serve to create a common understanding, help communication and inspire. Hence, keep it simple.