This year it will be 7 years that I’m assisting Neo4j in building out their professional services business. My previous stint with Pentaho was also 7 years, as was the period that I was building my own Business Intelligence hub at kJube. The realization that I’m coming up to the end of the 4th block of 7 years in my career (5th if I calculate my studies) seems like a good time to reflect on my in the IT business so far.
In a nutshell, here is what I did the last 28 years:
- The first 7 years of my career, I worked for a variety of system integrators and consulting companies. Basically, I learned technical skills but most importantly, I learned consulting skills and saw software implementation and customer software development projects of various scales and complexities, focussing mostly on data driven projects (decision support systems, data warehousing and business intelligence, data lakes, data mining, … ) across a variety of platforms.
- The next 7 years, I set up my own consulting business, called kJube, which to date is still the vehicle for most of what I do. I continued to focus on data driven decision making systems and developed a set of customers across Europe and learned (the hard way) what it means to run a business. I wore the legal hat, the HR hat, the finance hat, the sales hat, the delivery hat … and it was great fun.
- The next 7 years, I got pulled into a start-up called Pentaho, which bundled – mostly European open source BI and DI tools into a single suite and build a commercial model around that using venture capital from silicon valey. It was my first encounter with double digit growth and I helped them scale out their delivering team in EMEA and APAC from 0 to 60 people in about 4-5 years.
- Last but not least, I joined Neo4j, the undisputed leader in the world of graph databases. I joined Neo4j to do a rince and repeat of my work at Pentaho (“build a Professional SErvices team from the ground up and scale it out FAST”). Pentaho and Neo4j had a lot in common as companies. But the world of graphs turned out be much more niche than the world of business intelligence and data integration, which luckily made it a new, different and challenging experience that still entertains me.
In these 4 times seven years, a lot of things changed in the IT industry:
- When I started working, a lot of software was still custom coded. The maturity of enterprise software was still low and any business running something non-standard, likely had a bunch of programmers in-house to create software solutions for day to day operations that companies like SAP, Salesforce offer off the shelf today. The evolution from custom coding everything to mixing, configuring and customizing off the shelf products was very interesting. [The interesting question today is whether GenAI will make that pendulum swing back.]
- One of the things that stands out and still does not cease to amaze me, is the ever increasing speed of software development and implementation. One of the first projects I worked on had a 3 year implementaton plan. Looking back at it, today this could probably be done in 3 months. The speed with which consultants and software engineers can wip up solutions has gone from years to months to weeks. Back in the days everything had to be coded from the ground up. These days plenty of libraries are available across 1000s of github repos. And vibe coding will no doubht futher speed things up.
- As I stated, most of my career was focussed on data driven software, like decision support systems, business intelligence, etc. That aspect of my job was also totally revolutionized over the last 28 years. When I started decision support still meant a custom cobol program to extract the data required and format it into a report for the executives. Inmon and Kimball changed my world, and I saw the birth of a whole series of databases, data integration tools and analytical tools that enabled new ways of dealing with data. Data mining (now data science) followed soon after. That evolution pushed me to take a Master in AI in 2005. Big data followed. And now GenAI has arrived to revolutionize things once more.
- And last but not least, there was the cloud revolution. Back in the days every company had their own data center (computer room with tape backup). Then shared data centers started appearing. Today Amazon, Google and Microsoft have become the online supermarket for hardware (compute power) and software.
So, … 4 times 7 years, it makes you reflect!
And one of my observiations is that I want to spend more time sharing my experience of the last 28 years with others. About 10 years ago I used to run a very active blog (mostly on technical topics). I always found it a great way to oblige myself to organise my thoughts in a format that is digestible and shareable with others. And once you start, you kind off oblige yourself to maintain a certain pace.
So … here I go. Blog officially launched. I hope to share some interesting insights over the next weeks and months to come.
Enjoy!