Lode Vanacken

Background

About Lode Vanacken

Currently Technology Porftolio Manager at AE with a focus on structuring, optimizing and supporting buildout of the AE services and product offerings, enabling AE to stay at the forefront of innovation and deliver exceptional value to its clients. Before supporting AE with the buildout of their services and product offerings, the 10+ years, I have worked in a technical executive leadership role for SaaS companies (Selligent and DataCamp), building successful products bridging business and technology. Early on, I have always been interested in Computer Science and related topics inspired by gaming. Due to this interest in gaming, during my Master's degree in Computer Science, I decided to pursue a PhD in Virtual Reality with a focus on Human Computer Interaction. Using technology as a means to end, I missed being able to reach a wider audience with the work I did, which led to the decision to transition away from the academic world. During my time at Selligent and DataCamp, I inspired these organizations to focus on business outcomes with pragmatic technology choices as an enabler. Building cross-functional autonomous team that were empowered to deliver business outcomes in an effective and efficient way. Thankfully, in the last few years, we have been lucky to be able to leverage new technologies and concepts such as Public Cloud, DevOps and Platform Engineering (Design Systems, Microservices, Microfrontends) making autonomy and "fighting" Conway's law generally a lot easier. Besides empowering teams to focus on business outcomes, I tend to also be involved in security related matters ranging from compliance and risks (ISO 27001, GDPR, Threat Modelling) to offensive/defensive security (SIEM, SAST/DAST etc, Penetration testing and Bug Bounty Programs). In my free time, I enjoy reading technology related materials (mostly blogposts), spending time with my family or doing recreational sports (running, cycling, soccer).