There are no limits to what you can achieve. Go for it.

Manuel de Juan Palop

Sogeti Spain, Technical Director

My career at Sogeti started three years ago when I joined the Valencia office. I had been working in Madrid for some years and just felt I needed to come back home, so I started to look for work opportunities within my home city. Then a Sogeti proposal arrived and I became project manager, five-minute walk from home! Nice change indeed.

Sogeti was not an obvious choice. It was not very well known to me; it was not in the big league of IT players in Spain. If you want a fast and flashy career as an IT manager, there are companies other than Sogeti.

The culture at Sogeti is different; it’s not that hard, not that aggressive, it’s more employee-friendly and more customer-friendly.

Sogeti is a good place to work especially if you’re interested in high quality work and you want to be involved in meaningful projects, like SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture, which is one of my focus points at the moment. One of Sogeti’s technology leaders said once that you can divide the IT market in two fields: one part – and roughly 70% of all customers need this – is just work, nothing that others can’t do every time, every day; boring. The other 30% is when something is new and needs innovative vision, investigation and risk. That’s where I want to be in the market - with SOA.

SOA is not an easy concept at all. We have to do a lot of explaining, we must convince our customers why this kind of technology is going to change their business in a positive way.
And we have to explain that they may not realize the added value immediately, but they certainly will in the longer-term. We are sharing our skills and competences first of all with our key customers and then we’ll do so with a wider audience of potential clients. A sort of drop in a pond – that way the SOA message will be spread.

Of course, with SOA, size matters. SOA is more oriented to medium and large clients who, from the technical point of view, are able and prepared to invest in the changes that SOA brings about. That requires a minimum level of maturity. We use our own maturity model – which you can find in our book SOA for Profit* – to check that. Does the prospect have the right maturity level in terms of technology, people, architecture, software? And is that enough to support at least the start of a migration or anything related to SOA?

Going SOA is not like any other IT project. It’s a big change that you have to consider carefully. You start a whole new relationship with the client; it’s a challenge for both parties. You’re on a journey to a successful end, but it will take trust, confidence and time to get there.

The point in time when you can call it successful depends on which angle you take. In any enterprise, the business guy will have a different view from that of the IT manager. The business guy will look at the return on investment, at successful business cases. The IT manager will focus on better integration, cost reduction, improved development and compliance with current technology standards.

One of the big things about SOA is that it changes not only the way IT people think, but also the way business people think. Traditionally business people and IT people are like oil and water, there’s little in common, little communication. SOA however gives them a shared view. Business people are more involved now, providing much needed knowledge of their business and processes to IT people, and the IT guys learn a lot about the business.

SOA creates a new culture in a company; there will be new ways of making things, not only for software developers, but also for the end-user who can break down the traditional barriers in their imagination and in the way they work.

And of course, the current trend in the IT market and the whole Internet has changed so much of what the customer needs and asks us to provide. These are services closely related to SOA.

SOA is a big challenge and there’s a lot of ground to make up. Up until now, SOA hasn’t been widely implemented and our SOA experiences have been somewhat limited – although highly successful projects, like the one we have carried out at Telefonica, to improve their call center services, are paving the way. So that’s going to change; SOA will make a big impact. It will be hard work, but very rewarding. There are no limits to what you can achieve. Just go for it.

If I had to describe my ideal work it would not be far from what I’m doing now.

We’re doing great work in the Valencia office, the projects are well-defined, my relationship with my colleagues is excellent, there’s a lot of interaction with colleagues in Barcelona and Madrid and the balance between my work and personal life is just right!      

* SOA for Profit, A Manager’s Guide to Success with Service Oriented Architecture, written by an international team of SOA specialists from Sogeti and IBM, edited by Martin van den Berg, Norbert Bieberstein, Erik van Ommeren, Sogeti editions, 2007. ISBN 978-90-75414-14-1