Case 5: ClickmyBrain

42 Another strategic decision is to create partnerships for a full service proposition for which the first one has started at a municipal of a midsize city in the Netherlands. The mobility services for the employees requires the Vecore platform to provide an optimized mobility offering through sharing assets. The future ambition of Vecore is to open up propositions of customers which are all running on the Vecore platform for each other and create a new demand and supply proposition between them. It is expected to create a higher capacity utilization for customers and a denser network for end users. The architecture of the platform has been prepared for this purpose by making use of decoupling mechanisms of cloud computing such as use of containerized objects.

43 though a secured chat channel via the platform. This informal channel can be used to

exchange information about the details of the request between the two parties until followed by a formal proposal posted on the platform. The requesting organization will receive a long list of proposals and brings it down to a short list all on the platform. From the short list the final choice can be made and the deal with the chosen IT company can be sealed. This deal will initiate a project to be created on the platform. All other responding IT companies receive an automatic formal reply to thank for their proposals. The second matchmaking mechanism concerns a match between the selected IT company and the senior IT professional. The IT company who owns the project may find that they still lack some specific knowledge to run the project and can access the ‘brain grid’ to search for it and make a connection. Here also a request is placed on the platform with some specific specifications and based on that send to the IT professionals in the ‘brain grid’ on the platform that meet the criteria. IT professionals can respond and share their availability and join the project and through the ability to

communicate, receive notifications and tasks on the platform be enabled to fully engage. The current proposition offers next to the matchmaking mechanism the service to also manage the project work and project team on the ClickmyBrain platform. However, with the reposition these two functions will be inactivated and only be made available as plugins on special request. In the new situation the focus of the first proposition will be on the second matchmaking offering under a label called ‘SuperCircle’. SuperCircle will offer the

possibility for a single company to create a flexible layer of validated (IT) professionals who can be accessed and assigned to projects or interim assignments and since already validated the matching and assigning procedure will be very short and effective. The SuperCircle will be set up per company which means that an instance of the platform will be created making it only available for the stakeholders of that company. The brain grid, the population of (IT) professionals, not necessarily only IT anymore, will be developed by the company themselves using the two factor validation mechanism of the platform for adding new professionals.

44 Professionals can be invited by all members of the platform and will be validated before actually admitted. Their profile will first be validated by management, this can be a HR manager or line manager and then be validated by a random existing member of the brain grid. Validation will be done from different perspectives to not only understand the

knowledge, skill and experience level of a candidate but also personal attributes like social environment preferences and so on. The ambition is to further develop a functionality to create a professional passport for members in the grid which will also be used for

matchmaking. In addition to that a functionality will be developed to manage availability of the professional. Prototypes where already started but require further steps. Because of the flexibility that cloud computing offers, the transformation from the initial proposition towards the SuperCircle can be done in a rather short period of time and proceeded by next

development of new functionalities like the professional passport, the availability schedule but also a smart solution to link and share brains over multiple brain grids since a future ambition is to make an intelligent collaboration between SuperCircles possible. A review system for both the company as the professional after a completed project or assignment is currently not available but is defined on the roadmap. Next to a rating functionality the requirement is to be able to record a real, honest review which includes situational settings.

This information can then be added to the professional passport and be included in

matchmaking. When projects fail due to incidents with the professional, the company is able to expel the professional from the SuperCircle. The hygiene of the SuperCircle is the

responsibility of the company. Continues improvement is important for the platform which was developed in India on an Amazon AWS platform and with the use of micro services changes can continuously be deployed without having to bring the platform down for the users. Three to four pilots will be run to launch the SuperCircle propositions and through the learnings of the pilot, automation of on-boarding routines will be developed. With that automation, SuperCircles can easily be activated and used for new customers of

45 ClickmyBrain and support their growth model. Third party solutions were hardly used yet but will as expected be embedded in next development phases since there’s no specific business need to develop by themselves. The platform may benefit from the intelligent and

sophisticated services that are at hand also for smaller companies through cloud computing.

The second new proposition will be an offering focused on IT security solutions but will only start when SuperCircle has been launched successfully.