In my industrial activity I gradually moved from predominantly technical positions to roles where analysis, software architecture, team organization, client relations and professional training naturally intertwined. These management roles did not mean a departure from technical work, but on the contrary: an extension of it toward responsibility for the entire development process.
Viewed as a whole, these stages show how the experience accumulated in university and research was transferred into industry. In all these roles I remained concerned with the same themes that had interested me since my formative period: rigor of design, clarity of architecture, adequacy of technology to the problem and disciplining the development process.
The management roles I held in industry took place mainly in Italy, during a period when my professional activity was divided between concrete projects, consulting, training and, sometimes, partial resumption of university activity. Therefore, some intervals overlap: they reflect not confusion, but the plurality of roles assumed simultaneously.
Independent IT consultant, Italy
Technical director – EUROTRONIC s.r.l.
Technical director – SOFOS s.r.l.
General manager – CRESO S.p.A., Romania
Technical director – ASSIOMA S.p.A.
Training manager – Smarten S.p.A.
General manager – H.T.G. s.n.c., Italy
The first years spent in Italy were, professionally speaking, years of reconstruction. During this period I worked as an independent consultant, in a new context, with other technologies, other work styles and other market demands. It was a stage in which I had to quickly convert theoretical and academic experience into a practice oriented toward immediate results.
This period had a decisive importance for my subsequent evolution. It forced me to leave the relatively protected space of the university and to directly confront the concrete problems of beneficiaries: costs, deadlines, compatibilities, legacy systems, heterogeneous teams. It was precisely this confrontation that strengthened my conviction that authentic software engineering is not a theoretical luxury, but a practical necessity.
The first clear managerial position in Italy was that of technical director at EUROTRONIC. In such a role, responsibility no longer concerns just an isolated technical component, but the whole of a solution: team orientation, technology choices, the relationship between specification and implementation, as well as the dialogue between commercial requirements and the system's actual possibilities.
For me, this experience was important because it marked the explicit transition from the role of specialist to that of technical coordinator. In such positions you begin to see software from a broader perspective: not only as a program, but as a product, project and collaboration process.
The period spent at SOFOS had a considerable duration and represented one of the important stages of my activity in industry. As technical director, I had the opportunity to participate in the definition and coordination of software solutions in diverse contexts, which consolidated the applicative dimension of my experience.
In such roles, the actual work goes far beyond the simplified image of a "technical chief." It simultaneously requires understanding the client's need, choosing an adequate architecture, controlling the technical coherence of development, evaluating feasibility and, often, training the people involved in the project. In my case, this position was also a place of synthesis between a past as a researcher and a present as a practitioner.
The position of general manager at CRESO brought a change of scale and perspective. If the technical director remains anchored primarily in the technological solution, the general manager must look at the institution or company as a whole: strategic orientation, organization, external relations, development priorities and balance between resources and objectives.
For me, this stage was relevant precisely because it extended my experience beyond software in the strict sense. Here, technical competence had to be correlated with management decisions, institutional representation and a broader vision of how technology can support an organization.
At ASSIOMA I returned to a technical direction role at a stage when information systems were becoming increasingly distributed, more integrated and more dependent on careful architectural design. The role required both technological experience and the ability to guide teams toward robust and coherent solutions.
This position fits naturally into my professional trajectory: after years of research, development and management, I could approach problems not punctually, but systemically. It was precisely this systemic approach that remained one of the constants of my activity, regardless of whether I worked in university, research or industry.
The training manager position at Smarten suited me in a particular way, because it directly linked industrial experience to my teaching vocation. In the company environment, training does not mean repeating a university course, but adapting knowledge to the needs of a concrete project, a new technology or a team that needs to produce quickly and well.
In such a role, the emphasis falls on competence transfer: how to explain clearly, how to structure the material, how to choose what is essential for practice and how to build a bridge between concepts and implementation. It was, in a certain sense, the industrial form of a pedagogical experience I had been accumulating for a long time in the university.
The general manager position at H.T.G. concluded this succession of managerial responsibilities in a position that simultaneously required organizational vision, technical understanding and coordination ability. At this level, the decision no longer concerns only the correct implementation of a solution, but also the general orientation of activity, the relationship with partners, the selection of priorities and the company's positioning.
Looking back, such roles represented for me not a deviation from my initial formation, but a natural consequence of it. Whoever thinks about software in an engineering manner arrives, sooner or later, at being interested not only in the program itself, but also in the organization of people, processes and decisions that make it possible.
The management roles held in industry decisively complemented my professional profile. They forced me to apply in real environments what I had thought and taught for a long time on a theoretical plane: design discipline, modeling, conceptual clarity, methodological choice and responsibility for the entire lifecycle of a system.
If academic activity offered me the framework of reflection and formation, and research that of conceptualization and experiment, industry brought me into direct contact with constraints and the test of reality. It was precisely this meeting between idea and practice that was, I believe, one of the lines of force of my entire career.
