December 2020

As CIO of Colruyt Group, Peter Vanbellingen is at the helm of the most significant digital transformations. He considers it a great progression that has been made: “The number of enterprise architects was always a bottleneck. Thanks to the growth of Myreas - they doubled in size in 2020 - we are able to ramp up the number of strategic initiatives.”

Advising architecture

“Whereas 10 years ago the knowledge about enterprise architecture was limited to - literally - a few heads within Colruyt Group, most management teams are now discussing capabilities and pace layering.” Vanbellingen can only applaud this evolution to a more structured way of working thanks to Myreas.

"As the organization grew, we were faced with decisive business choices: where do you opt for synergies and where do you decide on diversified capabilities?” Enterprise architects take a conceptual look at those kinds of questions and have a supporting and advisory role in how a company will organize itself in the long term.

He emphasizes the importance of the latter. "The actual architect who makes the final decision is the business owner. But the guidance of an enterprise architect makes all the implications of the choice completely clear.” In this way, enterprise architecture on a meta-level determines how to work as an organization, but also specifically how a domain needs to develop further or how a business operating unit is going to deploy all the capabilities developed in its value chain.

Impact with a capital I

As enterprise architecture determines how a company will organize itself in the coming years, the impact is tremendous. "The enterprise architects at Myreas convert the vision of Colruyt Group into a strategic framework that they further translate into programs. The right architectural choices are giving us an incredible added value. A wrong choice could cause us an incredible amount of misery. Fortunately, as a human being you have the absolute privilege of being properly informed in every decision. And you should never be too ashamed to admit that you were wrong somewhere along the road.”

It typifies Vanbellingen to present things in a no-nonsense way. A quality that he also greatly appreciates amongst the enterprise architects of Myreas. "It helps us that they come to present different options in an insightful way.” He concludes by looking back on the collaboration with Myreas in the course of 2020: "Above all, I can say that I am very happy with the evolution of the past year. It brings exactly what I expected. And I think it is a story that will evolve even more positively in the course of 2021 and beyond!”