Tony van Büüren van Heijst

Michael Krigsman recently asked the questions "Do CEO's *really* care about IT?"  and reviewed a panel discussion by CEO's from tech companies talking about the issues of Business-IT alignment. He says, after listening to that discussion "it appears little progress has made been in addressing this issue." I would love to have heard the discussion between CEO's of non-tech companies to see if their views differed - my guess is if they were honest they would agree with Champy that "CEOs don't pay attention to technology unless something breaks down." Having said that, I have met many progressive CEO's who realize that their business can grow and thrive as a direct result of their investment in IT.  On the issue of Business-IT alignment, this is one of the fundamental reasons ... (more)

Agile Methodologies to Improve SOA

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it's "dead" or in the "trough of disillusionment." These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the number of organizations considering SOA, or that organizations have evaluated, but decided to shelve SOA for the time being. Or, ev... (more)

Introducing Agile: Hidden Benefits (and Some Challenges)

Our next presentation was by Stefan Meier, Associate Director, Software Development, Information Sciences Department at XDx. Xdx is a biotech company that relies on software and technology for their Molecular Diagnostic Technology. They assess patients who have had a heart transplant and whether they are likely to accept or reject the transplant. They are also working on a clinical study... (more)

E.ON Benelux: Using Agile to Quickly Adapt to Meter Market Changes

Next up at NextStep - Marteijn Mout who is the project managers of the 'New meter market model' at E.ON Benelux. E.ON is one of Europe's largest Energy providers with over 30 million customers in 30 countries.  E.ON Benelux has around 270,000 customers and they have been a customer of OutSystems since 2004. The project that Marteijn talked to us about during this session was to support t... (more)

Dynamic Business Applications and Insurance

In this NextStep session Pedro Rosa Santos who leads the consulting services team for Keep it Simple, an OutSystems Partner, addressed how Dynamic Business Applications can play a big part in the Insurance industry. Pedro described the quantum leap experienced in the Insurance industry from 2005-2008 as it tried to deal with market demand for new products, online self service, the need for... (more)