Hi, i'm Rob. This is my virtual home, my hiding place. When I want to escape from the real world, I just go to here. Add some furniture (write an article, personal or business, well ... is there a diff? ), add a room (implement a new functional module) or just paint the walls again (change the template, the layout of the site). That's why it changes here sometimes, not too often coz it won't feel like home  The  articles though, have a tendency to change iteratively in a couple of weeks time. Sometimes i even rewrite the piece coz i'm not happy with it anymore. Hey, that sounds like agile development! .... Not?

Well ... don't get confused ... enjoy

Perhaps a bit pointless to say but everything on this website reflects my personal opinion. I have never the intention to personally "attack" someone. If it looks that way, plz accept that this happens by accident and sometimes due to the (mis)use of the English language. Not my native tongue. 

 I will try to quote as accurate as I can but I can't always know somebody already had the same ideas long before me .

My career in IT started in 1977 at the age of 20. In fact I was studying geography but there was a strike on my campus (yes, the roaring and left 70's :) so achieving decent results was difficult. I needed some money and decided that I had to work for a while and wait until the strike was over. I responded to an ad of still my current employer explicitely looking for people who did not finish their study but were motivated to do something else. Weird, but not in those days ;-).

Although I kept myself a geography student for a year or 2, the IT-profession caught me and touched my heart. So i decided to stay and started to study informatics both with a pretty though internal and role-focussed training as well as an external and  more general IT college program.  

The first 10 to 12 years I ran through the classic path from programmer to designer and projectleader. Most of the time engineering applications in an IBM mini environment (Sytems 3 and 3x series). Most of the clients were in the manufactoring business so i designed and developed various CRM, PDM and ERP applications.

Then i was asked to become a business unit manager, usually of groups of about 100 professionals. I have done that ever since until December 2007. The role developed from a pure peoplemanagement function towards full size business-unit management including own route to market, service & capability development and profit & loss. Obviously, my skills were best used with creating new or rebuilding existing businesses.

The last 10 years or so, usually i was asked to play the leading role in a team of comparable business-unit managers, encouraging collaboration and joint business winning.

Today I am responsible for (innovative) industrialization.

Businesses: IBM, DEC and Oracle technologies, Software Factory & Agile Develoment, New Telco's, Technology Consulting, Network Infrastructure Solutions, Application Packages & Development in general services markets, Application Development in manufactoring and retail markets.

IT Roles: programmer, software architect, designer, analyst, projectmanager, software process consultant

Technical environments (in practice): IBM System 3, IBM System 3x, IBM 370 series, micro computers

Programming : RPG, Cobol, Pascal, Basic, 6502 assembler, Rexx, Natural, PHP, a couple of scripting languages and of course Ruby  (and a self designed language SLANG ;-)