Ivan Anckaert

At THE SMARTR CURVE, we have a true passion for innovation and strategies that deliver performance. The results we bring to you, are driven by orchestrating Business, People & Organization Technology, and Data to work in a very tight symbiosis, leveraging synergies that make a difference. With our multidisciplinary experience, we are committed to deliver solutions to your most complex situations to help your business achieve success and excellence.

My mission at Elia Group is to lead the Data Trust practice while generating more adoption across the corporate organization with digestible principles, methodology, organization and operating models, architecture and tools. Subsequently, while remaining the owner of Data Trust, I have focused my effort on leveraging Data Trust to enable data discovery, data exploration, data publication (open data) and innovation and with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data. Today, as an ambassador of Data Trust, I help to shape up the Data Mesh with very concrete strategic data product delivery.

‒ Sensibilize people with stories that explain them why curating data to build up trustful data is vital and what it really boils down to.

‒ Defined a vision, strategy and roadmap for the Data Trust practice.

‒ Transformed Data Governance into Data Trust mindset.

‒ Revamped the Data Trust practices from abstract and complex to digestible, adoptable and actionable, with continuous improvement, by means of co-creation.

‒ Transformed a data governance tool into a data catalog that facilitates exploration of all the knowledge about data.

‒ Framing an EU Tender, I conducted a market research to define the relevant features of the next generation data catalog. One of the outcome is a Metadata Snowflake framework to shape up the 360º view of data with all its knowledge.

‒ Delivered renewed architecture blueprints driving loosely coupled data integration capabilities that boost agility, reuse, durability, performance and availability.

‒ Extending the Data Trust practices towards German operations at 50Hertz.

‒ Framing the Quantified Risk Model, I am driving the Asset Division to improve data quality efforts, so the output results are reliable and trustable. Simultaneously, I design the relevant data products ecosystem, within Elia Group’s data mesh, for QRM inbound and outbound data.

My mission at Thalys (merged with Eurostar) consists in facilitating the digital transformation by providing the Digital Architecture foundations, blueprints, governance and methodology across the Enterprise, so Thalys can launch and improve their digital services offering, while reducing its complexity. This mission spans Strategic Thinking, Service Design Thinking with CX as the focal point, Business & Technology Alignment, Analysis and Cost Reductions.

‒ Defined a vision, strategy and roadmap of the digital platform while stimulating a focus on CX, and taking into account a potential merger with Eurostar, the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing operational pain points.

‒ Delivered solutions blueprints to deliver better technical performance of the digital platform, while establishing dashboards to measure the ongoing technical performance to better identify where to act first with great impact.

‒ Designed features, capabilities and enablers that are core to the digital transformation, such as A/B Testing, Personalization, Omnichannel Hopping, “Save to Google Pay”, Offline First CX, Customer Identification & Access Management (CIAM) and Unified Cross-Channel Data Layer across all systems, incl. Analytics, Testing and Personalization and CRM.

‒ Delivered a Partner Integration framework that boost sales performance, while embedding Security-by-Design and Privacy-by-Design.

‒ Revisited old inherited, biased, insignificant and non-compliant Business Requirements by refocusing on the essence of delivering a delightful CX. It led to deep-cleansing of the digital solution.

‒ Influenced highly the UX and Information Architecture of the digital touchpoints.

‒ Resolved many cybersecurity challenges to level up the trust.