Helmes

Meelis was once torn between sports and IT, but the gods of IT visited him in his sleep when he was twelve years old. “I dreamt I would be the greatest programmer in the world,” and then he proceeded to write his first program in BASIC—an application to draw international flags. “Mostly it drew the striped ones,” he says. “They were the easiest ones.” But the flags gave him a taste of IT, and he didn’t stop until he had written programming on a professional level in twelve different languages, which in a world where most programmers are proficient in only one, gave him a rather unique perspective.

At Helmes, his job is to marry the “nitty-gritty details of IT” with the business side of things in order to produce a superior result for the client. Like he did for TeliaSonera, where he worked with the client’s CEO to create a vendor-managed inventory system (VMI) designed for maximum efficiency and reliability, which ensured that a product the consumer wanted was on the shelf at the store where he wanted to buy it. In another major project, his team employed Microsoft platforms to create a sales and claim-handling system for the corporate sales side of If Insurance—a system, he says, “for companies who need to insure thousands of cars or hundreds of buildings.”

Meelis sees part of his job being to guard against development for the sake of development. “There are so many choices to make in IT. A lot of what I do is to make sure the ‘economic architecture’ is right, that the client doesn’t get a skyscraper if what he really needs and wants is a warehouse.”