Geel, Flemish Region, Belgium
Embracing the philosophy of being a ‘student for life,’ I am grateful for the diverse educational opportunities I’ve had. My academic journey includes: • ICT: Professional Bachelor and Academic Master at V.U.B. • Agriculture: Bachelor at K.U.Leuven • Blockchain: Developer and Architect at Howest • Operational Management: OU, Heerlen/NL I am now eager to delve into Earth Observation/Remote Sensing to quickly become productive as a Program Manager (PM) at VITO. With 31 years of experience at KBC, I have grown through various roles, including functional analyst, project leader, team manager, and system architect. While banking and insurance offer clear societal benefits, I am excited to transition to areas that resonate more deeply with my passions. At VITO Remote Sensing, I will focus on climate, environment, security, infrastructure, water, and agriculture. I am thrilled to join the ‘Agro team,’ where researchers leverage vast amounts of Earth Observation (EO) data to provide solutions for climate adaptation, disease control, food security, and the preservation of fertile soils and productive land.
As Program Manager Agriculture at VITO, I lead innovative projects that leverage cutting-edge technologies, including Earth Observation, to advance sustainable agriculture. My role involves managing a team of skilled researchers within the Environmental Intelligence business unit, overseeing the budget and in doing so, contribute to the VITO strategy.
I am excited to bring my project management expertise to VITO/Environmental Intelligence. In the Applications department, our team focuses on Earth Observation imagery sourced from Sentinel satellites and drones. My role involves developing Remote Sensing applications for Agriculture, reflecting my commitment to core values such as long-term planet preservation, food security, and a healthy environment.
When the ‘Programmable Money Platform’ became more mature, part of the services were grouped into an independent Agile Release Train (ART), named ‘Group Application Services’ (GAS). Initially I was appointed ‘System Architect Crypto Services’. As the business focus shifted away from Crypto, I pivoted to solution architecture of KBC-issued stablecoins instead. Which is challenging both technologically (Blockchain considerations, overall architecture) and regulatorily (GDPR, AML, Micar). Asked to elaborate the business processes, I embraced the Business Analyst role as well. Efficiently saving handover between BA and SA. Turns out that I much enjoy the business interaction, understanding the added value of what we are building.
After 20+ years of managerial functions (project leader, teamleader, scrum master), I’m happy to return to a content/specialist function in IT :-) The Blockchain study @Howest felt like an upgrade of my prior ICT studies. This is my private answer to the call to action by our CEO Johan Thijs: “What have you been doing ?” Hope for the support of fellow IT architects to bring me up to speed ! Grateful for what I learned from our Technology Analysts last years! Thanks, buddies!
‘Technology Analysts’ in KBC are the kind of IT architects that are concerned about non-functional requirements: recovery time, uptime, responsiveness, accessibility, authorisation, integration, DRP, etc. Hence they advize the infrastructure architecture, security measures and service organization for non-trivial automations. Servant leadership to these highly specialised people, as ‘teamleader’ and ‘scrum master’ consecutively, thought me a lot! The organization of IT infrastructure in a bank-insurance company is a world on its own. Happy that I learned to know so many dedicated specialists and how they operate.
Gratefully concluding a work period of ten years in 'Business Intelligence' (BI), I'm happy to move over to a non-typical IT team: CICKS. Non-typical in the sense that these collegues do not deliver software or hardware solutions themselves, but rather support IT teams in their communication, innovation, change & knowledge sharing (amongst others). I'm highly motivated to join this team, from the profound believe that higher productivity and higher agility in the organisation will only result from improvements in the way we collaborate.
As project volumes decreased, and the economic crisis imposed creativity in how work is organised, I switched back to the teamleader role. This time we chose for the organisation of a 'flex team' within our department OBS. What inspires me, is the search for continuous improvement in how to motivate people in working happily and delivering better-then-average results. Therefor I also participate in the 'Disciplined Agile Delivery' program, and try to bridge with people installing a 'new smell of the place'.
As the ETL subteams grew ready to become independent, I stepped aside for new talent to take over. The gained knowledge about BI in domain 'distribution' and the former experience in project management, allowed me to steer a sequence of Distribution projects. This includes extensions about client interactions to the Commercial Datawarehouse, construction of a new Information Layer Distribution component on Unix (learning client characteristics from transactions) and sales reporting on top of a TM1 cube. From here an Agile way of working was adopted and reused in other domains as well (e.g. Information Layer ICT).
For three years I switched from a 'create' role to a 'maintenance' role: 'solution center ETL mainframe' (extract-transform-load) provided maintenance of several information layers (amongst which IL Credits, IL Payments, IL Savings and Commercial Datawarehouse). My involvement and interest in 'business intelligence' (BI) started here. Sourcing solution was found in collaboration with our offshore partner in India (Valuesource).
After being involved with the selection process of a company-wide ERP system, my job was to implement the SAP modules for HR (a.o. OB, PA, PY, Time, SAP BW, Time registration frontend). To steer collaboration of three parties - KBC business, KBC ICT and an external partner (Accenture) - I took part in a three-headed program management team. This was an intense and yet enjoyable time, that succesfully delivered.