Database Administrator (expert)

Living in Flanders, with headquarters in Brussels, is the Flemish agency responsible for optimally organizing housing in the Flemish region. The agency then consists of approximately 500 employees spread over 6 branches in the various provinces. Living in Flanders contains six departments: premiums and housing quality, social housing projects, finance, customer support, policy and supervision.

Together with its partners, the agency wants to make quality, accessible, secure and affordable housing possible for all residents of Flanders, both for the Flemish housing market in general and for social housing in particular.

To achieve this, the agency fulfills four roles towards citizens, local authorities and residential actors:

• A supplier of quality. Citizens and housing partners can count on the agency every day for financing, premiums and subsidies, project support, advice and guidance, with enforcement as the final element.
• An expertise center that supports policy and implementation, and expands and disseminates knowledge about housing, with a focus on the core tasks of the Flemish Housing Code.
• A platform where expertise is exchanged with residential partners and connects them with each other on these core assignments.
• An engine for innovation and professionalization in the sector. This is done by providing impulses and inspiration to policy and to the housing market where opportunities are seen.

The most important values of Living in Flanders are collaboration, quality, personal initiative, customer focus and integrity.

Structure of the IT service

The IT team consists of approximately 70 employees. The team is heterogeneous and consists of both internal employees and external consultants, experienced experts, as well as younger technical consultants. The ICT department is responsible for optimal ICT support for the business departments and an increasingly extensive digitalization of the internal operations, of the interaction with residential actors and local authorities, and of services available to the citizen.

About half of the IT department is involved in software development and maintenance. In concrete terms, this concerns two Scrum development teams that do custom development in .NET, an SAP team, a case management team and several outsourced development teams. These teams are supported by business analysts and test coordinators. The functional management is done by Product Owners (some of whom work in a business department, others within ICT). Software development is done under enterprise architecture governance and according to agile principles. We use SAP for financial processes, case management and low-code platforms for file handling and workflow-based applications, and .NET Core (with both on-premise and public cloud deployment) for custom development.

Living in Flanders uses the Microsoft development platform and SAP.

The ICT projects work according to the SAFE Scrum methodology.