Oleg, you have been at NorCom for almost 10 years - as CTO you now have completely new tasks and challenges. How would you like to position yourself as CTO?
I think that as a CTO, in addition to technological know-how, business understanding is particularly important. As CTO, I see myself even more than before as an intermediary between the customer's specialist department and our software development and technology. I need to understand enough of both to be able to communicate successfully with both sides. To the customer, this means conveying complex technical concepts in a clear and understandable language, both for a technical and non-technical counterpart. It is important to build trust in the technology - especially when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence, which sometimes causes fears, for example of loss of control. However, the rapid development of artificial intelligence in particular harbors immense potential for all companies and public administration. In this way, Large Language Models, used correctly, can become specialists for previously unsolvable problems in the company through fine tuning. However, you first have to identify these possible uses - this is only possible if you understand the customer and their challenges and requirements.
What do you want to achieve as CTO, what do you focus on?
I want to be guided by NorCom's mission statement: We are committed to the Triple I's of innovation, initiative and integrity.
When I think of innovation, I think of DaSense: DaSense operates in a very innovative market, which makes it all the more important to always stay up to date and make the latest technologies available to our customers via DaSense. These currently include artificial intelligence applications such as large language models. The whole world is in AI fever and new applications are emerging every day - not all of them make sense. But those that are should be available to our customers via DaSense as quickly as possible.
I particularly relate initiative to our work together as a team. I want to further promote this and initiate more symbiosis and exchange between the projects. What is interesting for one customer may also be interesting for another and the know-how of a colleague can also help in another project. Here I am also increasingly relying on our asset-based consulting – that is, consulting that is based on our assets. Although the consulting team develops individual solutions for the customer, it can quickly fall back on fully developed components if necessary. I rely on a strong team that is thematically interlinked as closely as possible, develops best practices and can therefore make the offer more attractive for the customer.
That brings me straight to customer relationships, where I want to be guided by the principle of integrity. What I care about here is open and transparent communication and trusting collaboration. It is important to me that the customer feels good with us. On the one hand, I explain technical concepts in such a way that they are understandable even for non-technical people. On the other hand, it is important to address any problems that may arise at an early stage in order to be able to take appropriate measures. I care about building long-term, positive customer relationships.
DaSense is NorCom's central AI product. What plans do you have for its further development?
Our fundamental goal with DaSense is to make the latest AI technology enterprise-ready so that companies can use it in the best possible and safe way. DaSense should be the “gateway to the world of technology” for our customers. To do this, it is important to always be informed about the latest trends from the AI universe and to be able to assess the relevance for integration into DaSense. If we consider a technological innovation to be future-oriented - and we do so if it can improve business growth, efficiency and value creation - we integrate it into DaSense and thus give it a secure framework. The usability of DaSense when solving practical questions is also important to us - DaSense should be a very valuable AI assistant for the user. The user should not experience any technical hurdles. We rely on an intuitive, simple user interface and easy-to-use AI apps that automate time-consuming and error-prone routine tasks. We are constantly expanding our app offering. This is what our customers get with DaSense: access to the latest AI technology in a secure framework that is easy to use to solve practical challenges.