The customer as the foundation
Larik-Jan: ‘A good IT manager moves with this constantly changing world and tests trends against a couple of sources, namely: the customers, technology and the market. One of the most important sources of information for me personally are our customers. I like to engage with them, aiming to find out where their challenges lie, what they are up against and where we can help them. This can be at both operational and strategic level. On the other hand, I also spend a lot of time doing market research: I subscribe to newsletters, read a lot of reports, talk to suppliers and do online research. Overall, I try to draw as much information as possible from the market myself.
Office of the CTO
In addition, I do of course have a technical heart and like to test and try out as many new tools myself as possible. One of the places we do this is in our Office of the CTO. This is basically our technical playground. We don't just take anything from a supplier, but remain critical and always test a solution extensively before putting it into use. We are and remain a group of stubborn technicians, so everything must always work perfectly from a technical point of view. We must be able to rely on a solution and it must be able to work in the landscape in which we operate: being able to use it frequently and repeatedly for multiple partners is key.
Communities
Engaging and, above all, staying in conversation with peers is also very important. We do this at industry communities, such as Dutch Cloud Community: the industry organisation for hosting, cloud, VOIP and managed service providers in the Dutch market. This organisation regularly organises network meetings where we share knowledge with each other. The nice thing about the Dutch market: the community is conveniently arranged and in the Netherlands we are very open towards each other. I also see attending events like VMworld and visiting trade fairs as important sources of information.
