The origin of all the companies included in the Group van Dijk dates back to 1970. At that time, there was only one company, “Bureau Marcel van Dijk” named after its Belgian founder, and it specialized in documentary and information systems. In 1972, the activities were further deployed in the two companies established in Paris and Brussels.
In 1985, on the retirement of Marcel van Dijk, Professor Bernard van Ommeslaghe and Alain Liedts took over the company and extended its operations to include management consulting, organizational and structural auditing, strategic studies, designing and implementing office automation tools, ICT services supporting management and Information Technologies in general.
The growth was rapid and continuous. In 1987, Bureau van Dijk took the pioneering role in Europe by launching a new activity: the design and dissemination on CD-ROM (now online via the Internet) of economic and financial databases with information on companies, as well as other products like the “Grand Robert de la langue française”.
A second company, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing, was formed to assume responsibility for this activity while the consulting activities themselves remained grouped within the company Bureau van Dijk Ingénieurs Conseils, still based in two cities: Brussels and Paris. Bureau van Dijk Ingénieurs Conseils in Paris was headed by Mr. Jacques Chaumier, widely recognized for his expertise in documentary engineering and for his work as author of several reference books.
Since then, things have changed significantly at both the organizational and the legal levels. The company BvD Electronic Publishing has been successfully sold and the competences and business activities of the French and Belgian companies have been divided between four legally distinct companies:
§ in 2000 : Bureau van Dijk Ingénieurs Conseils S.A. in Paris ;
§ in 2000 : Bureau van Dijk Information Management S.A. in Paris ;
§ in 2006 : Van Dijk Management Consultants S.A. in Brussels ;
(Previously known as Bureau van Dijk Ingénieurs Conseils en Gestion)
§ in 2006 : Van Dijk Information Consultants S.A. in Brussels.
These companies are independent of any other group, whether financial, industrial, commercial or other. Their shareholders are private individuals who are members of the management and the boards at these companies. Even though the four companies are separate legal entities, we like to talk about the Group van Dijk because firstly they all have a main shareholder in common, i.e. Alain Liedts, and secondly their consultants and experts often combine their specific skills to establish multidisciplinary teams working together on a project.