ASZ (Automatisering Sociale Zekerheid) is a software house owned by the Gak Group. The Gak Group is involved in the regulation of social security schemes in the Netherlands. Under these regulations, benefits or provisions are granted to workers in special circumstances such as unemployment, sickness or disability. The Gak Group is a privatized company, financed by trade and industry. It handles pension, assurances and social security schemes on behalf of approximately 5 million workers. The group operates from 30 district offices and 200 smaller branches spread all over the country. Due to frequent changes in the Social Security Acts as well the IT infrastructuur, many of its information systems evolve permanently. More than 15000 workers are employed in the Gak Group.
Thiel Chang is a manager research and development at the ASZ (Automatisering Sociale Zekerheid bv) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has responsibility for the experimental research programs for the innovation of legacy information systems. Before becoming manager R&D, he has also had several managerial positions like head of a large software maintenaince department and head of a main frame systems group. He has worked extensively on object oriented software engineering, (OO)databases, knowledge based systems, reusability, software architecture, software components and client server applications. In a significant number of his research projects object oriented methods and OO case tools were used. He has also teached computer science at some colleges. Before joining ASZ he worked as a computer scientist and project leader at several Dutch companies. Chang received a BS degree in mathematics at the Leiden University in 1978 and studied computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He has published over 10 papers as a co-author in journals as well as conferences and served on invited panels and program committees at several ACM conferences. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. His current research include design and implementation of business objects and component-based applications.