Ger Schoeber

Ger Schoeber — owner of Task Switch | Trainer at High Tech Institute

Ger Schoeber is a systems architect and trainer who has taught systems architecting since the early 2000s. At High Tech Institute, he is content partner, course leader and trainer. He works with the CAFCR framework of Gerrit Muller, which looks at a system from five perspectives: two technical and three that concern the customer. Schoeber considers systems architecting a relatively young profession in which architects often lack the support that engineers and project managers take for granted.

Schoeber studied electronics, software and computer science. He started his career in 1984 as a software developer at Philips. Five years later, he moved to High Tech Automation, a technical software service provider, where he progressed into systems architecture and project management. In 2001, he founded Task Switch, his own consultancy for multidisciplinary system architecting. From 2008 to 2011 he worked as a consultant and business-case developer at Sioux, and in 2011, he joined the Hotraco Group as Manager Innovation & Technology. From 2021 to March 2023, he was group lead and domain expert in System Engineering at Lightyear in Helmond. He is a past president of INCOSE-NL, and a member of the System Architecture Study Group (SASG). Since March 2023, he has worked through Task Switch on interim assignments in software and systems development. Since founding Task Switch in 2001, he has coached and trained more than thousand systems architects, both in Netherlands and abroad. He was awarded Teacher of the Year in 2020.

Schoeber teaches Systems Architect(ing) and Advanced Systems Architect(ing) for engineers and architects who work in the broad, multidisciplinary field of systems architecting. As a lecturer, he focuses on communication: engineers often have a purely technical point of view, while an architect also must understand the customer and their market. Participants practice closing communication gaps, and at the end of the course, they must convince a management board of their solution. He often starts with his own past mistakes, because they show trainees how far theory and practice can differ. He tells participants that an architect should build not only what the customer asks for, but what the customer needs, and he advises architects to spend a day with their customers. In a column, he compared the role of the systems engineer in infrastructure with that of the systems architect in high tech: in infrastructure the emphasis lies on the process, whereas in high tech, it lies on the product. He argued that model-based systems engineering and digital twins will remain tools whose use depends on people.

Ger Schoeber is owner of Task Switch, a consultancy for multidisciplinary system architecting, and content partner, course leader and trainer at High Tech Institute for Systems Architect(ing) and Advanced Systems Architect(ing).