Soltius

Consultant focuses on business problems

Starting out as a Chartered Accountant, Phil van Dam is now a solution architect and the leader of the Enterprise Management team at Soltius. But regardless of his role, Phil says his interest is in solving business problems.

Phil became involved IT consulting while working as a Chartered Accountant in the mid 1990s. This soon led to opportunities in Canada, where he helped to build a professional services company from five consultants to 120.

He first began working with SAP solutions during this time and says his broad business background is now an asset. “I work cross-functionally, so you need to have an understanding of a range of SAP solutions as well as processes outside of the SAP space.

“I like addressing business problems. To do that you not only look at how the technology can solve problems, but how changes to wider processes will improve a business as well.”

One of the common issues facing medium-sized and large enterprises is getting the business to work together across different departments, Phil says, and solving that problem takes more than IT skills.

“A big part of it is spending the time to understand the business. You need to be able to deal with people to understand what they are doing and find ways to make improvements.”

Phil is excited about how Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (eSOA) and Business Process Monitoring (BPM) can help organisations to understand the links between the business and IT, but he says there is a lot of groundwork to be done. “eSOA is a new concept to most organisations and it will take some time to understand what it will mean for them and then how to implement and incorporate eSOA into their business.  But once they do there is a lot of potential for these approaches to streamline and improve business processes.”