2016 in review and drinks on January 12

2016 was a very interesting and successful year for ICT Institute and we would like to thank everyone involved with a New Year’s reception on January. Interested? Read about the highlights in this review article and mail us for an invitation for the drinks.

New Year Drinks

Our New Year’s reception takes place on January 12, 16.00 to 18.00 in Utrecht at a location easily reachable by train. There will be at most two extremely short speeches by Sieuwert and Floris, and the rest of the time is reserved for individual questions, introductions and interaction. We are an open companies and in principle anyone is welcome (associates, customers, partner companies, etc). In practice we do need to know who is coming. So if you would like to come, send us an email.

Investment and IT Due Diligence

We were surprised this year by all the investment activity in technology startups and growth companies. We were able to help many investors by conducting the IT Due Diligence. In these projects, we help investors understand what technology they are investing in and spot any technology risks. For us these projects are extremely interesting because we can learn a lot from the innovative tech companies that receive investment. We also like the fact that we help the economy by making these investments possible. We conducted 10 IT DD projects in The Netherlands, Norway, UK, France and Germany.

We cannot share details on the deals we contributed to. However we did contribute to this excellent overview of startup investments 2016 in The Netherlands. We helped two of these transactions succeed.

Information security

Information security was a hot topic in 2016 and will still be in 2017. The meldplicht datalekken (obligation to report data breaches) was a major factor. It forces all companies to take active security measures. We have launched Security Verified in order to help companies prove that they have an active security team. We would like to thank all our pilot customers, including SOWISO and Tabster who received the first certificates. In 2017 we will continue to share practical advice for free on our website, similar to our blog posts on password policy, risk management and asset inventory. Ideas for further blog posts are welcome!

Quality, agile and education

Many organisations are still struggling with IT quality. We have helped many companies improve, often by using an agile approach. One way to do so was provide more information on code metrics in visual studio. Another way was by discussing DevOps.
The most interesting project however was to solve any issues at the root, by educating the next generation of IT professionals. We gave a course in Software Project Management at the Free University, and also a course in systems engineering. We hope to give many more practical courses and lectures in 2017.

Your ideas and suggestions

Our wish for 2017 is many new ideas and collaborations. Do you have ideas or do you like to work with us? Send us an email and/or come to the New Year Drinks. We are looking forward to invest in new ideas and people and even have a few open positions for new consultants.

Image credit: Kazuend via unsplash