Alain Couniot

Technology changes at breathtaking speed, but for Alain Couniot, good IT architecture is about much more than keeping up with the latest innovations. Architecting requires both structure and creativity, an understanding of both business and technology, and the ability to make choices that will stand the test of time. 

As a senior Enterprise IT Architect at Sopra Steria, Couniot works on complex architecture and integration challenges, with a particular focus on the transport sector. His job is, in many ways, to bring order to complexity and keep it manageable. An IT architect must be able to structure situations that may initially look chaotic, while remaining creative enough to find innovative solutions. 

For the past twenty years, he has mainly worked as an enterprise architect, a role he describes as a bridge between business and IT. Technology specialists can easily become dazzled by the possibilities of a new technology, but Couniot believes that technology should never become an end in itself. A solution only makes sense if it addresses a genuine business or societal need. 

That requires an architect to understand different perspectives says Couniot: “You have to listen carefully to all the stakeholders: the business, the IT specialists and the people who will eventually operate the solution or otherwise impacted by it. It requires a lot of insight, empathy, and active listening, staying current with the new technologies, but also being aware of the most common pitfalls. And you also have to consider costs and practical constraints. It is really about maintaining a 360-degree view.”  

Interestingly, a career in IT was not Couniot’s original plan. He studied mechanical engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain with the ambition of becoming an aeronautical engineer. But his studies coincided with the pioneering era of computing, and he started programming on mainframes. 

He quickly became fascinated by the possibilities. “You imagine an algorithm that could solve a problem, turn that idea into code and then see whether the program behaves as you intended, including in its corner cases. Even today, there is something almost magical about that.” 

His final university project brought his two interests together by combining fluid mechanics and IT. The results were promising enough for his supervisor to invite him to pursue a PhD. His ambitions in aeronautical engineering abruptly gave way to a scientific career. Later, when opportunities in scientific research proved limited, he moved into the private sector and joined Siemens in IT consultancy. From there, his career took him through the financial sector, social security and public transport before eventually bringing him back to consultancy.  

Today, Couniot has been with Sopra Steria for almost seven years. Much of his work is focused on transport, and one of his current assignments is at a regional public transport operator. Alongside his civilian career, he is also a senior reserve officer in the Belgian army.  

A recurring theme in Couniot’s work is integration and automation. Many organisations still depend on legacy applications that continue to deliver value and cannot simply be discarded. At the same time, they need to introduce new applications, technologies and ways of working. Connecting those different worlds is therefore an important part of modern IT architecture to ensure the smooth co-existence and transition between those systems. 

Throughout his career, Couniot has also been interested in using technology to make people’s everyday work simpler and more efficient. His earlier work on business process management and case management is a good example. A well-designed case management system can bring information, participants and the entire history of a case together, giving employees much more effective support in their daily work.  

Some of the projects Couniot remembers most fondly demonstrate the importance of looking beyond technology. At a regional public transport operator, for example, he specified and deployed a business process management system (BPMS) that was implemented in just six months, exceptionally fast at the time. The real achievement, however, was that the result satisfied a remarkably broad group of stakeholders, including management, users, key users and trade unions. 

Another memorable assignment was the selection and implementation of a salary management system for the Flemish government during his time at Siemens. The challenge was to bring together the requirements of many different stakeholders and translate them into one coherent solution, and finally moving to production without any incident. 

Experiences like these have reinforced Couniot’s belief that successful IT projects depend on more than technical expertise. Honesty and transparency are fundamental, according to him. “When something goes wrong, tell the project owner and work together on a solution. Trying to hide problems or doing a little window dressing is not only unethical; in the long run it destroys trust. And once you lose a customer’s trust, it is extremely difficult to regain it.” 

Throughout his career, Couniot has worked on a wide range of complex projects in public transport. What makes the sector especially interesting to him from an IT perspective is the constant need for optimisation across virtually every area. 

“Public transport and freight face somewhat different challenges. In public transport, one of the fundamental questions is how to optimise the service in relation to its cost. A public transport operator also has a social mission. Serving someone in a remote area will never be profitable in itself, but society may still decide that the service should exist. “In freight and logistics, optimisation takes another form. You want your trucks, trains and other vehicles to carry loads for as much of their journey as possible rather than travelling empty. At the same time, the sector must deal with rising energy costs and increasing regulation. “ 

Technology can help address these challenges he thinks. Energy consumption, route planning, capacity and multimodal transportation all present complex optimisation problems. When freight moves from truck to train and perhaps to another mode of transport, for example, reducing waiting times and unnecessary handling can make the entire chain more efficient. Digital technology, in particular Internet of Things and Digital Twins, increasingly provides organisations with the tools and information they need to make better decisions in such complex environments.  

Data and artificial intelligence are opening up further possibilities. Couniot sees significant potential in Digital Twins, which can help organisations model situations and forecast what may happen. Couniot: “Predictive maintenance is another very promising area. By combining operational and maintenance data with machine-learning techniques, you can identify patterns that may indicate future failures and intervene before they become serious problems.” 

Another area with significant potential is Mobility as a Service. Instead of passengers having to arrange every stage of a journey separately — a train journey, a car, parking and a metro connection, for example — mobility can increasingly be approached as one integrated journey, complete with real-time support in case of perturbations. Combined with the right incentives, that convenience could also encourage people to choose more sustainable forms of transport.  

Yet Couniot is careful not to present AI as a solution to every problem. The fact that a technology is fashionable is not a reason to introduce it at all costs. What matters is whether it solves a genuine problem and delivers real added value.  

This pragmatic approach is also reflected in what Sopra Steria can offer transport organisations. Couniot points to the company’s capabilities as an operator and integrator, combined with its expertise in operations, architecture, data and AI. “Creating value does not necessarily mean developing every technological building block from scratch. Often, the real challenge is knowing which components to select and how to assemble, integrate and operate them successfully within the customer’s environment.” 

That connection between strategy and reality is especially important when making architectural decisions. An architect may make choices today that will influence an organisation for many years, even though the underlying technology can change dramatically during that period. 

Couniot believes the answer starts with accepting that obsolescence cannot be eliminated. It is a risk that needs to be explicitly recognised and managed. At the same time, architects can make systems more adaptable by building abstraction into their designs. 

Enterprise architecture therefore places considerable emphasis on business capabilities, because these tend to be much more stable than individual technologies. For example, a transport organisation will continue to need to plan services and track vehicles, freight or passengers. Whether the technology supporting those capabilities runs in a particular cloud environment or on-premises is much more likely to change. 

The same principle applies at a more detailed level. Higher-level functionality should, where possible, be decoupled from lower-level technical details. Couniot compares it to building with Lego bricks. “At certain points in your architecture, you should be able to remove one block, replace it with one or two equivalent blocks and still have a functioning solution with minimal friction. That ability to evolve is an essential part of future-proof architecture and of an architect’s work.” 

Ultimately, what motivates Couniot is not technology itself but the problems it can solve. He particularly enjoys tackling difficult challenges that have a meaningful impact on customers, organisations or society. The most rewarding outcome is when a seemingly overwhelming problem is transformed, through hard work and teamwork, into a solution that exceeds the customer’s expectations. 

That also explains an important distinction in his view of innovation: technological evolution is not de facto progress. It only becomes progress when it actually improves someone’s professional or private life or the working of society as a whole. 

Regarding architectural and technological challenges, Couniot likes to cite a quote attributed to Mark Twains, that he particularly likes: “They did not know it was impossible, so they did it.” For him, questioning assumptions and looking beyond the apparently impossible are important ingredients of innovation.  

Keeping up with new information is essential, but so is judging the reliability of that information. With enormous amounts of information available and considerable hype surrounding technologies such as AI or quantum computing, he believes critical thinking has become more important than ever. Rather than accepting claims at face value, IT professionals should compare sources, question assumptions and look at problems from as many different angles as possible. “Creativity is essential, but so is responsibility, he says. “Just because something can be built does not necessarily mean that it should be built. IT professionals need to consider the consequences of the solutions they create.” 

For Couniot, ethics should be an integral part of working in technology. “Stay human-centric, consider environmental and societal impacts and take a 360-degree view. Ask yourself who benefits from your work, who might be disadvantaged by it, what are the risks, globally, and whether you are ultimately contributing to something worthwhile. Technology is powerful, but how we choose to use that power remains a human decision.”