Nationale Nederlanden | Tom Kennes

Nationale Nederlanden

· 2 min read · 306 words · Nationale Nederlanden

For more information: Nationale Nederlanden

 

Context

Nationale Nederlanden’s Dutch Non-Life business is one of the dominant market players in the Netherlands, with a rapidly growing portfolio of data- and AI-intensive applications ranging from finance-reporting-oriented data pipelines to agentic systems that run parts of business processes autonomously.

 

Intervention

As Domain Architect, I own the architecture across the full data and AI landscape. That means setting architectural direction for how data engineering, analytics, and AI capabilities evolve together — making calls on platform boundaries, AI workload governance, and how cloud-native patterns land in a regulated enterprise context. A large part of the work is social: aligning platform teams, data engineering squads, and AI initiatives around shared patterns and principles, while providing architectural guardrails that give teams enough structure to move fast without diverging.

On the technical side, a key part of my role is maintaining the architecture runway: making sure the foundational decisions, platform capabilities, and integration patterns are in place before teams need them, so delivery doesn’t stall waiting for architecture to catch up.

 

Business Impact

  • Established cross-domain architectural alignment, reducing duplicated platform efforts and accelerating capability delivery
  • Defined governance patterns for AI workloads (from classical ML to agentic systems) in a regulated context, enabling safe and scalable adoption
  • Created shared architectural guardrails that increased team autonomy while maintaining consistency across the domain
  • Served as the architectural counterpart to business and IT leadership, ensuring domain-level choices align with organization-wide strategy

I’m aware that descriptions like these can read a bit abstract. Architecture roles tend to sit at a level where things sound vague precisely because they cut across so many areas. If you read this and thought “I’m not sure what that actually means in practice,” that’s a fair reaction and I’d genuinely welcome the question. You can find me on LinkedIn or drop me an email.