Enterprise IT Architect

Johan
Celis

I design the architecture that lets technology and business move as one.

For more than twenty years I've worked at the seam between IT and the business it serves — turning deep integration experience into enterprise architecture that organisations can actually act on.

I keep a deliberately broad, multidisciplinary skill set, because the problems worth solving rarely stay inside one discipline. And I like explaining the work — to engineers and to the people who will never read a sequence diagram alike.

Experience

20+ years

Based

Belgium

Focus

Integration · EA

Languages

NL · EN · FR

What I do

The broad, multi-year view of an organisation's technology — grounded in hands-on integration experience.

The long view

Enterprise IT Architecture

My work centres on the broad view: translating business strategy into a coherent target landscape, and a roadmap that plays out across a three-year investment horizon. It is the discipline I grew into — and where I add the most value today, keeping technology decisions aligned to where the business is heading.

Broad view3-year horizonBusiness ↔ ITTarget landscape

Architecture Governance

Principles, decision models and review that keep choices coherent — prioritising by impact and risk.

Strategy & Roadmaps

Sequencing investments over time so the landscape evolves on purpose, not by accident.

Landscape & Portfolio

Mapping business capabilities onto applications, shaping target state and rationalising what exists.

Integration Architecture

The foundation I came from — connecting systems into coherent, end-to-end flows across the enterprise.

Where I've worked

A deliberately broad footprint — I move fluently across sectors and contexts.

Media & Broadcasting Government Energy Retail Dredging & Offshore Wind Telecom Home Care Food & Process HR Life Science Transactional Communication Direct Marketing

Selected work

A curated set of engagements — the challenge that brought me in, and what I delivered.

VRT

Enterprise Architect

07/2024 — Present

Public Broadcasting · ERP Transformation

Challenge

VRT set out to replace its legacy SAP landscape and rethink how finance, HR and resource planning operate and integrate across a large media organisation.

Delivered

Architectural lead on the program — assessing suppliers and their solutions, standing up an enterprise integration capability for future-proof integrations, and shaping an EA governance model that prioritises effort by impact and risk.

Symeta Hybrid

Enterprise & Solution Architect

09/2021 — 06/2024

Colruyt Group · Transactional Comms

Challenge

A shifting market, customer base and competitor landscape meant the transactional-communication business needed a new vision and a credible technology path.

Delivered

Co-defined the business vision with the CTO and a service designer, and prototyped the conversational future of customer communication. Then led the product team — reference architectures and a data platform — and organised the architecture practice across the company, reporting progress and risk to management every two weeks.

Mediahuis

Integration Architect

07/2021 — 10/2021

Media · API Vision & Strategy

Challenge

A multi-country media group growing through frequent M&A needed a clear API strategy to plug into the digital ecosystems around it.

Delivered

Ran workshops and interviews to produce a tailored set of drivers and goals aligned to corporate strategy, plus a roadmap of actions and milestones to launch their API program.

Wonen Vlaanderen

Enterprise Architect

03/2020 — 04/2022

Flemish Government · EA Practice

Challenge

An agency that outsources nearly all of its development to different suppliers needed a uniform way to run projects across the full application lifecycle.

Delivered

Created the ICT Governance Framework — a blueprint uniting development, security, architecture, analysis and support — and represented the agency in the Flemish Government's Data Reference Architecture initiative, shaping the blueprint for a data-driven government.

Atrias

Solution Architect

09/2018 — 08/2019

Energy · Clearing House Platform

Challenge

Belgium's energy clearing house needed a prepayment platform for social customers and an IT landscape ready for near-real-time readings from a rollout of digital meters.

Delivered

Represented Atrias toward external implementers — validating architecture against its principles, guiding SSO, and overseeing performance, monitoring and security testing — while shaping the big-data architecture and technology strategy for meter-reading ingestion.

DEME

Enterprise / Integration Architect & Team Lead

02/2013 — 08/2016

Dredging & Offshore · Internal Platforms

Challenge

A global dredging and offshore-energy contractor needed its integration and content-management platforms modernised — and a team to lead them.

Delivered

Led the integration team and built target architectures (BizTalk, Dynamics AX), then took on document & content management — SharePoint upgrades and cloud rollout, a vessel-to-shore project solution, and the Employee platform as architect and scrum master.

Get in touch

Open to enterprise-architecture and integration mandates, advisory and interim roles.

JohanCelis

What I do

Enterprise IT Architecture

Where I've worked

Selected work

Get in touch

Johan
Celis