Digital 2.0 Episode 1: Christian van den Branden, CTO of Qualifacts

When I say that Christian is an expert, I mean it. He’s been in the industry for over 25 years and has worked on infrastructure systems, buildings, security systems, and DevOps systems.

What he found with those companies is that they had a much easier time transforming because that was their primary goal. Technology was the very nature of who they were.

It’s all about vision.

Qualifacts is a software company. Yes, the end goal is to help people with their behavioral care, but they sell to an audience that’s really looking at technology to solve a different problem than someone who’s buying a storage system, a security system, or doing their engineering themselves.

Similarly, you need to connect the technology to a business context. You need to understand your client’s needs, how they connect to the technology world, and where they’ll be in five or ten years. When it comes to large scale and long term strategies like this, it’s not only about the technology, it’s about the future business of the company.

Another thing to consider is what you shouldn’t do. It’s important to figure out what you’re going to leave behind, what you’re going to exclude from your effort, so you can focus on your objectives.

It’s important to have the right talent to handle the work. You need to either hire the right talent or partner with the right firms that can provide you with the right expertise to make your project a successful one.

For example, if your client’s business is focused on financial services, healthcare, or revenue, you need to partner with firms that can bring you up to date with data, listen to your context, guide you in the selection of technology, and even provide you with a team to help you carry out the work long term.

That’s why Qualifacts partnered with us at PrimeTSR. We help them tackle all the difficult problems, get to innovative solutions, and then create a good implementation of those solutions that they can rely on for years to come.

This is exactly the topic I brought up with Christian van den Branden, the CTO at Qualifacts, an expert on digital platforms and company transformation. He also has the most important role in the technology direction of Qualifacts and the CareLogic platform.

We covered a broad range of subjects. His experience, the lessons he learned, what innovation means to him, and his predictions for the next ten years among others. The information he shared was invaluable, and I’m sure it will be of great use to anyone reading what he had to say.

“To me, innovation is overused” was the first thing he said.

He called it an overused term, whereby any new feature, anything more advanced in delivering your services is considered innovation.

To a degree, that might be the case. Some of your customers may see it that way.

To Christian, true innovation is how you solve a problem in a very effective way, or more effectively than what the industry has done before. The best example of innovation is “how do you solve a problem that the people you’re going to be delivering that solution to didn’t even know they had before?”

True innovation is difficult to do. It takes a chance, the right context, the right moment, and it takes brilliant people to achieve.

We’ve seen a few examples of this in the last few decades thanks to the way the internet has transformed things thanks to the public cloud and browser service.

“To me, innovation is overused” was the first thing he said.

I asked Christian what he saw as having the biggest impact on both him as an individual and on his company.

In the field I’m in today”, he said, “regulations and compliance have been highly important unlike in past roles.” They had always been one of his major concerns and drivers of his requirements both for his employees and from his clients and influenced the way he did things.

Another thing was the capabilities available to him at the time. He had to always be aware where the industry was going, so that he could remain competitive and make choices that allowed him to keep pace with the digital world.

As you figure out ways of delivering services digitally, or just become more competitive by modernizing the way you did it before, you have to keep track of whether your competitors have jumped ahead of you.

You need to make the right bets, and you cannot transform or modernize your company every two years. This is a five or ten year long bet you’re making.

“Public cloud capabilities are very important to us at the moment”, he told me.

He considers them highly important due to public feedback. People will often start a business journey, make great plans, start working on many activities towards the end goal of delivering a service. Then, they go into a long period of time without any feedback from their customers. That will often cause them to fail without even understanding why.

Public cloud methodologies handle this problem perfectly. They enable you to continuously deliver value, be able to validate your consumption, and get the correct feedback.

To a degree, that might be the case. Some of your customers may see it that way.

To Christian, true innovation is how you solve a problem in a very effective way, or more effectively than what the industry has done before. The best example of innovation is “how do you solve a problem that the people you’re going to be delivering that solution to didn’t even know they had before?”

The companies that succeed are the ones that continuously reinvent themselves.

No sacred cows.

No fear of change.

Find ways to put yourself out of business, or someone else will.

Sometimes the most remarkable examples of digital innovation come from unexpected places.

Take Natixis, an investment banking company. They’ve embraced cloud technologies faster than most companies. And certainly faster than any company that isn’t a hardcore SaaS provider.

Interestingly, they’re not even located in the epicenter of technology, Silicon Valley.

They’re based in Paris.

The banking industry is full of companies like this. So keep an eye out. You never know where innovation will come from.

A company like Microsoft could have stayed stuck.

They could have simply protected the recipe that made them successful in the past.

Instead, their business model today has almost nothing to do with where the company started.

Constant reinvention is much easier said than done, but it’s the fundamental thing keeping companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon at the forefront of the tech industry.