My Vision, my Journey.

From a Traditional Company to The Next Enterprise

My name is Pascal Debroux. I am the founder and CEO of Itersys, a software development company specialized in the railway sector, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2026.

Over nearly three decades, I have lived through several major waves of transformation: the early days of the internet, the rise of mobile, the emergence of distributed work, and more recently, artificial intelligence. Each wave reshaped tools, practices, and organizations. Yet, in hindsight, what struck me most was not the technology itself, but the speed at which these shifts began to expose the limits of traditional enterprise models.

The enterprise of tomorrow is not a distant projection.
It already exists — in fragments — all around us.

My journey is not that of a “future of work” theorist. It is the journey of an entrepreneur progressively confronted with a simple reality: our operating model had to evolve to remain relevant. Infrastructure costs and rigidity, recruitment complexity, workload volatility, accelerating technological cycles, and changing expectations from talent all pointed toward the same conclusion — the historical framework was reaching its limits.

For many years, the office was a central pillar of Itersys. As a small company, the workspace — its address and location — played a structuring role: recruitment, training, cohesion, production. The office was the natural center of gravity of the company.

Then, cracks began to appear. Mobility constraints increased, commuting times lengthened, and fatigue became structural. Over the course of a year, hundreds of hours of life were absorbed by low-value travel. At the same time, digital and collaborative tools reached a new level of maturity. A simple question emerged: why continue to organize a company around a place, when value creation no longer directly depends on it?

The first trigger came in 2016, when an employee wanted to relocate to the south of France. I attempted a form of occasional remote work, conceived as an extension of the existing model. It failed. In retrospect, the reason is clear: remote work does not function as a marginal adjustment. It requires a complete and coherent architecture.

Between 2017 and 2018, economic pressure accelerated the reflection. An office that had become too large, too expensive, too rigid. Managerial energy increasingly consumed by invisible logistics: maintenance, equipment, peripheral constraints. That was the moment I decided to turn constraints into opportunity — and to go all the way.

The shift to Full Remote was a rupture. More importantly, it revealed a fundamental truth: at a distance, you no longer manage presence. You manage clarity, deliverables, accountability, and trust. This shift forces a different structuring of work — documentation, visible workflows, explicit expectations — and the construction of a culture independent of hallways and coffee machines.

Management evolved deeply. It became more intentional, more explicit, and more demanding. The role of the manager is no longer to control, but to align, to frame, to fluidify interactions, and to preserve the human link in a distributed environment. Performance is no longer measured by time spent, but by the reliability and quality of what is delivered.

A second transformation followed naturally: freelancing. Not as opportunistic outsourcing, but as a structural lever to access specialized skills quickly. Over time, a hybrid model emerged — long-term collaborations, often four days a week, built on partnership rather than contractual constraint.

This evolution required the creation of a “virtual office”: a single point of convergence for work, information, and client relationships. Not a tool, but a nervous system for the company. It was then that I understood I was not merely implementing remote work, but designing a true Remote-First enterprise architecture.

Artificial intelligence integrated naturally into this model. First as support for software development, then as a lever for process optimization, knowledge structuring, and decision support. Today, we are developing several AI-driven initiatives — not to replace humans, but to increase clarity, quality, and operational efficiency.

Looking back, I no longer see these changes as isolated disruptions, but as components of a single movement. It is not only the way we work that is changing, but the way the enterprise itself is designed to operate in an unstable world.

This journey led me to write and share — not a turnkey model, but a structured reading grounded in real experience. That is the purpose of this blog. It is addressed to leaders and entrepreneurs who sense that incremental adjustments are no longer sufficient, and that the real challenge now lies in operating models and enterprise architecture.

I do not advocate a single model. Multiple forms of enterprise will continue to coexist — and that is healthy. But I am convinced that organizations whose activities are compatible with distributed work, yet fail to consciously redesign their architecture, will fall behind in ways that are difficult to recover from.

Over time, I realized that these successive choices — distributed work, freelancing, management by deliverables, digital tools, artificial intelligence — formed a coherent whole. A model I had built without naming it.

Today, I call it The Next Enterprise.

Through this blog, I will explore what, in my view, is shaping this new enterprise. Without dogma or universal recipes — but with a strong conviction: the enterprise has reached a tipping point. Structural choices can no longer be endured. They must be designed, assumed, and consciously built.

The future of the enterprise is not declared.
It is being built — now