I thought I was going to spend my life coding, but when I worked in a health start-up, no one else had experience with business meetings, meeting investors, executing projects, and such. I was interested, and read up on relevant subjects.
Amir is still reading up and is currently taking a course in strategy and management at Harvard.
My job now is to bridge the gap between strategy and technology. For customers with an established strategy, we see how IT can execute it, while for other businesses we help develop the strategy with IT in mind.
Amir and Cegal specialize in one specific industry, namely energy.
Our customers range from power companies to oil and gas companies, grid companies, and electricity companies as well as some carbon capture projects. We're facing a huge energy challenge, and helping to solve that challenge is a big part of why I get up in the morning. We can contribute with something very concrete - with one of the pieces in the big puzzle of measures that are needed.
The projects vary greatly, both in size and nature.
For some customers, we have carried out a cloud migration to make the company more efficient and secure. For other customers, we have acted as a hired IT department, which we have done in renewable energy companies that are in a start-up phase where they do not have this expertise themselves. We have also carried out due diligence on the IT stack of an IT company that one of our renewable energy customers wanted to buy.
Although the projects are varied, there is one principle Amir and his colleagues try to follow in all of them, namely to fight fuss.
IT very often becomes a complicated maze of solutions and a whole host of buzzwords and industry jargon. If the customer doesn't understand what's being presented, they won't be able to make a decision. So our job is to simplify and talk about the value we create rather than the technical solution as such.
That's where the combination of knowledge of both technology and business is very valuable.
The knowledge from both fields is crucial to explain things in an understandable way.
Although Amir is immersed in strategy and management, he doesn't forget his roots in technology. He still likes to "geek out" on technology.
In the hallways of Cegal, it's impossible not to notice the term 'You Matter' - a kind of postulate for how Cegal treats its employees.
For me, it means that you should be seen and heard. As a manager, it's important for me to ensure that young employees in particular feel that they are taken seriously.
Being seen and heard is not the only feature of the work environment at Cegal; diversity is also a hallmark of the business.
I like that we are so diverse. I'm originally from Iran, and the environment here is definitely multicultural. We also have a lot of people who don't speak Norwegian here, and that's a completely natural part of our culture.
A third feature of the culture is the degree of freedom. We have quite a free rein here in Cegal. Right now, we're in the process of spinning out a new service in our department, without necessarily having cleared it in all directions.
"We're very agile and have a level of trust that I appreciate. In that sense, we are in many ways still an entrepreneurial business, even though we have gradually become quite large and international. A nice-nice combo, if you ask me."