Tony van Büüren van Heijst

Hugo Sousa, IT Director of Turismo de Portugal, started out by sharing with the audience his commitment to the business goals of Turismo de Portugal. For that, he showed us his project goals:  Measure and get 90% satisfaction People are all that matters Do IT better This is a very important change in IT, where usually the metrics are measured in bandwidth and server uptime! Hugo pointed out that to do this IT Governance was a must. But because the rules can change and need to be adapted, Hugo stated that what he really needed was Agile IT Governance. After looking at several pre-packaged solutions, Turismo de Portugal picked OutSystems because it was the technology that could provide the necessary flexibility to implement IT rules in a simple and agile way. By using OutSystems technology and implementing with INOV a centralized help desk system, Turismo de Portug... (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, even worse, that after an initial investment in implementing SOA architectures, organizations have been unable to capitalize on these investments. So, what's happening? What were these companies ex... (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 real-time information exchange with agent & broker channels and the drive to invest in new technology in order to reduce costs. The problem, Pedro explains, is that this has created an extremely ... (more)

Business Process Reengineering in an Agile Way

This morning's last presentation on track 2 was delivered by Rui Afonso, OutSystems Channel Manager at Hyfas. The presentation was about Hyfas success story at Refrige.  Refrige had a very complex material creation process, that spanned across 7 distinct departments. Communication was made by email and Infopath, and at the end of the process the IT department would copy the gathered information into SAP and BASIS. The IT department had to confirm all the data, and sometimes this resulted in having to request missing inputs from information owners. Hyfas considered both SAP and Ou... (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 to provide the data to find correlations between genetics and pathology in disease/immune system-related areas. Prior to Agile & OutSystems - the development team was 5 developers and 2 SQA and... (more)