Java Experts in Germany

Agile Transformation: introducing agile principles and transforming traditional IT departments into Scrum and Kanban teams

IT Operating Model: redesigning the IT organization and introducing modern delivery structures and roles

Flight Levels: building up Flight Levels practices within IT to align strategy, coordination and operational execution

Leadership & Coaching: recruiting Agile Coaches and coaching Scrum Masters and IT leaders

ERP Operations: acting as Interim Product Owner for the existing ERP landscape and ensuring business continuity

ERP Transformation: reorganizing and supporting the ERP migration as a Project Manager; Phase 1 (financial accounting) live since October 2025

Operational Core (ERP): establishing dedicated teams for ERP Support, Feature Development, and ERP Migration

Modern Workplace: initiating the transition towards a Microsoft 365-based cloud workplace environment

Integration: establishing a dedicated team to drive integration and connectivity initiatives

Warehouse Operations: building a cross-functional team to support logistics and warehouse-related capabilities

Maintenance & Operations (M&O): introducing a dedicated team for system engineering, security, stable operations and continuous improvement

AI Initiatives: identifying and promoting practical Artificial Intelligence use cases across the IT department

As Interim Head of IT for a German medium-sized industrial distributor, I am responsible for 31 IT employees and lead the digital and organizational transformation, reporting directly to executive leadership. I took over an IT department with almost no basic structures – no clear roles, processes, documentation or ticket system – and with significant technical debt that tied up most of its capacity. Introduced agile principles and ways of working in the IT organization and transformed the traditionally structured IT department into cross-functional Scrum and Kanban teams focused on transparency, collaboration, and customer value delivery.

Redesigned the entire IT organization by establishing a modern operating model, introducing new roles such as Product Owner, Scrum Master and Solution Architect and strengthening the organization through strategic hiring and targeted capability development. Recruited and onboarded Agile Coaches to accelerate the transformation and personally managed and coached Scrum Masters as well as IT department leaders to foster servant leadership, self-management and a culture of continuous improvement.

Aligned IT-internal planning across eight teams to three Flight Levels based on Klaus Leopold (strategy, coordination, team), laying the foundation for later company-wide portfolio management. Consolidated the backlog of more than 10 workstreams and prioritized it by business value and cost of delay. Introduced a ticketing system to increase transparency and enable data-driven decision-making, flow-based work management, and greater accountability at all levels.

Established and supported multiple cross-functional teams, including the Operational Core (ERP) domain with dedicated streams for Support, Feature Development and ERP Migration, as well as teams responsible for Warehouse Operations, Maintenance & Operations (M&O) including system engineering and security, Modern Workplace, Data Quality and integration initiatives. Worked closely with Agile Coaches to support team development, remove impediments, and continuously improve delivery effectiveness.

Acted as Interim Product Owner for the operation and enhancement of the existing ERP landscape while supporting the ERP migration as a Project Manager. Reorganized the project organization and had the already negotiated contract with the implementation partner realigned with a focus on approach and overall responsibility; Phase 1 (financial accounting) has been live since October 2025. Collaborated with the selected implementation partner to design and establish the project organization and target operating model for the ERP transformation, introducing agile delivery structures and ways of working. Facilitated the alignment between business, IT and the external vendor and played a key role in negotiating the contractual framework and delivery model to ensure a sustainable foundation for the transformation program.

Initiated the strategic modernization of the workplace environment through the adoption of Microsoft 365 cloud capabilities, establishing the foundation for enhanced collaboration, scalability and future digital services.

Launched AI initiatives to identify practical business use cases and promote the responsible adoption of Artificial Intelligence across the IT department. Encouraged self-management and empowered teams to take ownership of decisions, delivery and continuous improvement.

• Operation and further development of the network and security infrastructure.

• Monitoring, analysis and resolution of network and security incidents.

• Cross-departmental collaboration with other teams on operations and further development, and reporting.

• Firewall vulnerability analysis.

• Firewall access requests.

• Troubleshooting IP communication issues on network and firewall infrastructure.

• Security-critical IT infrastructure, processing of personal data, compliance with legal requirements.

• Products: Palo Alto Networks Firewalls, Cisco ACI, Checkpoint Firewalls, F5

• Technologies: SDN, SDWAN, Cisco EPIC, Cisco ACI

I designed and built a self-service AWS platform for Data Science teams with little or no infrastructure-as-code experience. A team writes about 10 lines of Python and gets a deployable stack with full SDLC release cycle that already follows the governance rules. Networking, encryption, IAM and tagging are decided by the platform, not by each team.

New teams or AWS accounts are onboarded with one pull request. Waste prevention and cost control is built into the defaults: Data scientists don't need infrastructure skills.

• Construct library (AWS CDK, Python). Built a versioned catalog of about 20 hardened constructs for being used in data-science projects with ML context
• Governance as code
• Multi-account, multi-tenant
• Golden-path scaffolding
• CI/CD and supply chain. Built reusable GitHub Actions workflows
• Release engineering
• QA with e2e, contract testing and unit test coverage with each release candidate

• Creating concepts and architecture for domain integration (SEAT into the VW structure)
• Domain trusts and administration
• Operation and administration of Windows 2022/ 2025 servers and domains
• Domain restructuring
• GPO and SG editing and migration
• DNS restructuring and migration

Technologies: Windows 2022, Active Directory, ADFS, AD Azure Connect, DHCP, DNS, GPO, VMWare vSphere, Hyper-V, Powershell, Jira, MS Office 365,), SCCM, VSAN Fileservices, Approximately 800 servers, 400 users

• Extension of a Swing-based UI for recording Security Restricted Articles during baggage screening.
• Introduction of a new workflow for recording Deboarding Events.
• Extension of the reporting system for Security Restricted Articles and Deboarding Events.
• Implementation using JBoss Wildfly, PostgreSQL, spring-boot 3.x, Java 8/21, Swing, JSF, JAX-RS/Resteasy, Docker, Maven, Kiro.

Working Environment

• Insurance / Claims Management (Property, Liability, Automotive)
• REST-based ClaimAPI with Guidewire ClaimCenter

Scope

• Further development of the internal REST-based ClaimAPI with Guidewire ClaimCenter as the backend and various portals/front-end offices as clients, and with the following objectives: + increased AI-supported claims processing outside of Guidewire ClaimCenter + and support for all lines (property, liability, automotive).
• Further development of automated claims processing

Activities

• Interfacing IT & Business
• Design activities with documentation in Confluence, Jira: + Requirements engineering (functional and non-functional) + Design of REST endpoints and coordination with interface partners (esp. AI-colleagues) + Identification, design and evaluation of alternative solutions (moving away from a monolithic approach toward fine-grained endpoints, with code reuse across all lines if possible) + Creation / refinement of product backlog items in Jira, i.e. epics, user stories and tasks, incl. alignment with developers & POs during (pre-)refinement sessions + Using AXA Secure GPT when creating / refining user stories (description, acceptance criteria) and designing REST endpoints + Estimation and prioritization of user stories and tasks during Sprint Planning sessions + Coordination and support during the implementation of Product Backlog items + Driving decision making with preparation and presentation of decision-making documents
• Quality assurance: + Test management, including test case creation using Xray in Jira + Test execution using Bruno as REST client and in Guidewire ClaimCenter + Submission of test artifacts for PO approval + Analysis of production bugs

Methods Big Room Planning (aka PI-Planning in SAFe), Scrum, BPMN, EPK, UML, ERM, DDD

Tools / Tech Stack Teams, Confluence, Jira with Xray, OpenAPI/Swagger, REST, JSON, XML, MS Office, Bruno, GitHub repository (reading), Guidewire ClaimCenter, AXA Secure GPT (AXA's in-house GenAI solution based on Azure OpenAI)

Description of duties “Atruvia / HCL International” Role: HCL Notes Banking Support, Domino Administration / Migration / Operations Operations, administration and technical support of the HCL Notes/Domino environment in the Atruvia banking environment on behalf of HCL. As part of an international support team, the focus was on second- and third-level support as well as the processing, management and monitoring of SLA tickets in categories 1, 2 and 3. Duties included the technical analysis and resolution of incidents in the Notes/Domino environment, system administration, and the development and modification of Lotus Notes /Domino applications and LotusScript agents when a programming solution was required. Another focus was ticket dispatching: analysing and assessing incoming tickets, assigning them to the responsible departments and specialist teams, and subsequently coordinating and tracking processing within the agreed SLA periods. There was also direct communication and coordination with subject-matter experts, departments and end customers of the connected banks. In particular, when language or technical communication problems arose within the international support team, German-language customer communication was handled and mediation between customers and technical specialists was provided. Objective Ensuring stable and reliable operation of the HCL Notes/Domino landscape in the Atruvia banking environment and the timely processing of business-critical support cases in line with the agreed Service Level Agreements. Incidents were to be analysed as early as possible and either resolved directly through administrative measures or suitable LotusScript/Notes solutions, or forwarded specifically to the responsible specialist teams. As of: 25.09.2026 (Version 2.10 LITE) including project times Page: 3 of 32 SPO-SOFT EDV Beratung, Dipl.-Ing. Klaus Kano, Tel.: +494532-2767682, Mail: [email], [link] At the same time, qualified preliminary analysis and targeted ticket dispatching were intended to ensure that every ticket reached the technically and professionally responsible department immediately and that unnecessary transfers, processing times and associated costs were reduced. Result Operational Notes/Domino support for the banks served was reliably ensured throughout the entire project period. SLA-relevant tickets were systematically analysed, prioritised, assigned to the responsible departments and tracked through to resolution. Some incidents were resolved directly through administration, technical error analysis and the development of suitable LotusScript agents and modifications to Notes/Domino applications. By directing tickets specifically to the relevant expert and specialist teams, incorrect assignments and unnecessary processing loops were reduced and compliance with the agreed SLA times was supported. Direct communication with the banks and mediation between German-speaking end customers and the international support team also contributed to efficient problem resolution and high customer satisfaction.

• Developed browser based platform for kubernetes no-code deployment and cluster management
• Developed CLI in Typescript to deploy the resources in the cluster without leaving the browser UI.
• Implemented DevSecOps pipelines: image scanning, SBOM, policy enforcement, supply-chain security and used Kyverno. Implemented IAM integration for the command line utility tool.
• Designed role & permission models for Keycloak, oAuth/OIDC, social login flows.
• Used LLM to convert user intent into the diagram.
• Worked on integration with multiple Sovereign Cloud like stackIt, Hetzner, CIVO, UpCloud plus public clouds like AWS, GCP, Azure
• The technology stack includes Java, SpringBoot, Kubernetes, OpenAI, Kubernetes multi-tenancy using vCluster, Karpenter, RBAC for CLI, Helm, React

AI Readiness - Part 3: Creating an e-book on the use of AI in software testing

• Designed and created an e-book on the sensible and safe use of AI in software testing from the perspective of an experienced test expert.
• Used generative AI (ChatGPT, Perplexity Pro) as a sparring partner for structuring, wording suggestions and creating variations, with all content finally reviewed and approved using my own expertise.
• Developed practical insights into the opportunities and risks of AI in testing, with a special focus on collaboration between testers and AI instead of “tester vs. AI”.
• Title: “11 starke Gründe: Dream-Team statt Rivalen - Tester und KI sind gemeinsam unschlagbar”
• Subtitle: “Wie Mensch und Maschine im Softwaretest das perfekte Team bilden – und warum reines KI-Testing riskant ist.”
• Planned use of the e-book as a basis for workshops, customer meetings or internal training.
• Technology: Generative AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity Pro, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, many years of hands-on professional testing experience, common sense.

Led the end-to-end integration and migration architecture for decommissioning SAP IS-U market communication and transitioning to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) with E.ON IT Services — covering regulated EDIFACT market messaging, a three-phase data migration (transfer of market message inventory after cutover), redesign of market communication processes, and full GDPR and German energy-market compliance.

• Designed the three-tier target architecture (SAP IS-U → NScale B2B gateway → SFMC) processing 50,000–100,000 EDIFACT messages daily within sub-5-minute SLAs.
• Architected the three-phase data migration: 36 months of historical data, zero-loss cutover of in-flight market messages, and near-real-time CDC synchronization.
• Delivered secure, BDEW/GDPR-compliant integration (AS2/OFTP2, RFC/IDoc, REST APIs, OAuth 2.0, Azure AD, AWS S3) achieving >99.5% uptime, <0.1% migration discrepancy, and RTO <4 hours.
• Applied BPMN to model and optimize the market communication processes.

Technologies: SAP IS-U, NScale, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, EDIFACT, OAuth 2.0, Azure AD, AWS S3, BPMN, Jira, Confluence, Draw.io

• Engaged within the Information and Security Management division for a Proof of Concept (PoC) project focused on developing a Client Security Portal.
• Managed project resources across the UK, India, and Germany.
• Architected and deployed the PoC solution leveraging a modern Java stack, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Kubernetes, and Active Directory (Entra ID) for authentication.
• Implemented OAuth 2.0 for authorization.
• Ensured DORA alignment according to Deutsche Bank security rules and regulatory preparation.

Developed the product vision and outcome strategy for a new registry platform, designed a management workshop for strategic alignment, conducted BPMN process mapping across systems and roles, analyzed user story practices and further developed them on an outcome basis, and brought together stakeholders from business departments, management and the external development partner.

Skills: Product Strategy, Outcome Roadmapping, Stakeholder Workshops, BPMN/Process Analysis, Miro, Linear

• Established a cyber resilience framework for AI-accelerated threats in the Frontier AI Threat Endurance (FATE) program: capability assessments, maturity assessments and gap analyses covering cyber security, operational resilience, incident response, recovery and governance, followed by target concepts and improvement measures
• Supported action owners from specification through implementation: implementation roadmaps, decision papers, management presentations and governance reporting, as well as audit- and supervision-ready documentation; managed stakeholders from IT, Information Security, Risk Management, Operational Resilience, Business Continuity and the business units

Product:

• Built a production-ready AI platform for generating brand-aware marketing images and videos from product data, user requirements, and uploaded media.
• Own the platform architecture, technical roadmap, API design, security, deployment workflow, operational reliability, and model-provider strategy.
• Developed the core platform in .NET and built supporting AI and workflow prototypes in Python, applying language-independent API contracts and structured interfaces between services and model providers.
• Implemented reliable background processing with RabbitMQ, persisted workflow state, idempotent handling, retries, failure recovery, logging, secure storage, authorization, and credit accounting.
• Made pragmatic build-versus-buy and model-routing decisions based on reliability, latency, cost, and maintainability rather than novelty.

Agent Orchestration & RAG Systems

• Built and compared agent workflows using Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, and LangChain, including tool use, conditional routing, clarification steps, state management, and hand-offs between agents.
• Implemented reusable .NET components for agents, prompts, tools, model providers, structured responses, and retrieval with pyvector, making it easier to change AI providers without rewriting the core workflow.