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CIONET - What's next

Connecting ambitious digital leaders and businesses around the globe.

Catch up on the upcoming CIONET Events

             
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Italy Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical italian

Innovation in Balance: governing the power of data and automation

Nel percorso verso l’AI e la trasformazione digitale, dati e automazione sono gli elementi centrali di ogni strategia tecnologica. Ma senza una governance chiara, rischiano di diventare non solo fonte di inefficienza, ma anche di rischi e incoerenza.   Come garantire che i dati siano completi, accessibili e affidabili? Come automatizzare le operation IT e i processi aziendali mantenendo controllo, compliance e sicurezza?   Durante questa roundtable esclusiva, organizzata da CIONET Italia e IBM, affronteremo:   La governance come abilitatore di dati affidabili e automazione sicura. Come prepararsi a un’adozione dell’AI realmente scalabile. Il ruolo di controllo, resilienza e gestione del rischio nell’innovazione.

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Belgium Oct 16, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table - Rethinking AI

AI isn’t just another tool. It changes how we work, how we think, how we organise ourselves.Yet most organisations still approach it like a digital upgrade, deploying assistants, automating workflows, testing use cases inisolation.The results are predictable. Short-term wins. Long-term confusion.Effort spent. Value unclear.Many companies can’t connect AI to their actual strategic goals,and the promised ROI never materialises.At the same time, something deeper is shifting.AI can now reason, decide, adapt. Not just mimic processes butcontribute to them.The technology is evolving, but the way we implement it hasn’tcaught up.If your AI still fits inside a single department, you’re likely solvingthe wrong problem.If it works only for individuals, you're missing how your teamsactually deliver value.If it replaces people instead of supporting them, you're buildingfor today, not tomorrow.The next step isn’t more AI. It’s the right AI.Built for your business, your teams, your way of working.Not a tool to add but a structure to build around.Are we ready to treat AI as a shared capability, not a scatteredexperiment?Can we move beyond individual efficiency and build systems thatcollaborate, learn and adapt with us?Those are the questions we’ll explore at the round table.

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Poland Oct 17, 2025 Invitation Only Physical & Virtual Polish

IT EXECUTIVE MASTERCLASS 5

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Germany Oct 28, 2025 Country Members Physical german

Köln: Powershift

Am 28. Oktober lädt CIONET CIOs und Digital Leaders nach Köln ein: hier stellen wir reale Anwendungsfälle vor, in denen KI-Agenten Aufgaben autonom übernehmen, Prozesse beschleunigen und Entscheidungen vorbereiten – mit messbarem Nutzen für das Business.

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France Nov 4, 2025 Country Members Physical french

Maîtriser la souveraineté numérique: du réseau à la donnée

À l’ère des mutations géopolitiques et réglementaires, l’établissement d’une souveraineté numérique est devenu un élément stratégique essentiel pour les entreprises. Ce dialogue stratégique mettra en lumière le rôle fondamental du réseau dans la mise en place du contrôle, de la confiance et de la résilience. Nous explorerons comment une infrastructure moderne et résiliente permet d’appliquer des politiques de gestion des données et d’assurer la continuité opérationnelle. Ce dialogue stratégique, réservé à un groupe restreint de pairs, est conçu pour permettre aux leaders du numérique d’échanger sur l’un des enjeux les plus urgents aujourd’hui. Nous discuterons des réseaux « sovereign-ready » et débattrons des préoccupations croissantes autour de la souveraineté des données, qui motivent l’adoption de politiques de confidentialité et de protection des données de plus en plus strictes à l’échelle mondiale.

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Netherlands Nov 10, 2025 Public Physical english

Reis mee: CIO Innovation trip Web Summit 11 nov 2025 Lissabon

CIONET Nederland vertrekt met een groep Nederlandse CIO's en digital leaders 10 t/m 12 november 2025 voor de geheel verzorgde CIO Innovation Trip naar de Web Summit in Lissabon, Portugal. Reis jij mee of neem je collega(s) mee!

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Recent Cases

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Deutsche Bank moves modern work to the credit side of the ledger with Microsoft Teams Phone

In the highly regulated field of finance, business communications with customers must meet stringent regional security requirements. Deutsche Bank found the answer to these needs by implementing Microsoft Teams Phone, consolidating all communication channels into one application - Microsoft Teams.

Embracing a modern platform like Microsoft Teams instilled a level of connection across the globe that we’ve never had before. It’s truly brought Deutsche Bank closer together as an organization than we’ve ever been.   Simon Peach: Managing Director, End User Computing - Deutsche Bank

 

 

Taking a global banking empire into the future

More than 150 years of strategic banking experience has given Deutsche Bank a future-first perspective. The company rapidly expanded into several international locations within a decade of its 1871 founding. Deutsche Bank went on to become one of Germany’s leading banks and is rated by S&P Global as one of the 30 largest banks in the world. Staying ahead of and modeling responsible change has earned Deutsche Bank the trust and respect of its customers. 

Change on a truly large scale was needed when a constant influx of rapidly evolving regulations, coupled with faster technology advances and a shift to more flexible work, challenged the bank’s communications technology platform. Its legacy telephony system required expensive and frequent updates to keep pace with regulatory change. In concert with that increasingly unsustainable pattern, Deutsche Bank workers craved advanced communications tools. What was needed was complicated but non-negotiable: a unified solution that enabled the bank’s global workforce, collaborating from within 60-plus countries, to communicate across a complex matrix of locations, job functions, and time zones. “Communication is the backbone of everything we do at Deutsche Bank,” explains Marcus Jung, Chief Information Officer, End User Computing at Deutsche Bank. “Keeping our employees in touch with each other and their clients in the most secure and compliant way possible is crucial.” 

And providing a human-centric tool set is critical to the experiences of both employee and client. “People need open communication channels that function as if they were sitting right beside each other,” says Jeremy Kirk, Managing Director, Investment Bank at Deutsche Bank. “And being in a highly regulated industry, we strongly focus on record-keeping and retention.” Client-facing workers, such as traders in the German financial services industry, can be subject to having their customer interactions monitored and recorded. 

The answer clearly lay in a unified tool set. “Having a standard way of adhering to regulatory compliance is critical for us,” explains Simon Peach, Managing Director, End User Computing at Deutsche Bank. “Whether we capture a conversation through voice recording, eDiscovery, or other means, we need to ensure that we’re using communication technology that meets regulatory approval.” 

With growing competition for skilled workers, the bank needed a technology refresh: a communications platform that would help workers soar in job satisfaction and productivity and could adapt to growing, changing regulations. 

Transforming the digital workspace on a global scale

Deutsche Bank had deployed Microsoft 365 as part of its cloud transformation, including Microsoft Exchange OnlineOneDrive, and SharePoint. With a unified technology platform in place, Theo Georgiou, Principal Technology Manager, End User Computing at Deutsche Bank, began the workplace modernization project, starting with the regulatory compliance aspect. That meant bringing the proliferation of mobile devices into line with device-agnostic management. Georgiou’s team rolled out Microsoft Intune, simplifying device management for multiple operating systems (including iOS and Android) and form factors. He formed a close collaboration with the teams responsible for Deutsche Bank’s legal, compliance, GDP, eDiscovery, and surveillance functions. “We focused intently on regulatory compliance,” Georgiou says. “And while we wanted to ensure easy collaboration between groups who need to work together, there are other groups such as Research and Equities that, by United States law, are not allowed to exchange information. We used Microsoft solutions to put information barriers in place as required by local laws.” 

Georgiou was also very aware of the needs of Deutsche Bank workers, the demands they face in a world that continues to be more mobile and more time-sensitive, even as regulations multiply. And in an increasingly hybrid work environment, he realized that workers need flexibility to work in different ways without violating local regulations. “We have 60,000 people who are using mobile devices in addition to desktop devices,” Georgiou says. “We need to provide them not only with compliant, secure access to Microsoft productivity applications, but also with accessibility for people who are blind, deaf, or have other accessibility issues. Our success in bringing so many workers into that compliant circle is a big story for us.” His team replaced Deutsche Bank’s previous telephony system with Microsoft Teams Phone, adding a voice recording feature in compliance with local laws. 

Migrating seamlessly with automation

Automation was critical to making such a big change for so many across the world. The Deutsche Bank team worked with a Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery team to create an end-to-end automated solution to transfer workers from their previous telephony service to Teams and Teams Phone, delivering a fast, reliable, and stable migration. “We provisioned over 130,000 workers within eight months,” says Georgiou. “The automation we built with our Microsoft colleagues was key to that success. Manually configuring the parameters for the applications our global workforce needed and enabling the environment for them would have been impossible otherwise.” 

The team used smart AI logic to send invites to technical and training sessions. The delicate and time-consuming task of ensuring that local restrictions were instituted accurately, and the appropriate capabilities were activated, was fastest and simplest with that automation. The team also used the logic rules they’d set up to select which groups of workers would onboard to the solution depending on their local restrictions and needs. Deutsche Bank enabled 1,500 people every day, not because of any technical limit, but because Georgiou wanted to ensure that his team would have the capacity to personally interact with everyone who needed attention. “The Microsoft team played a significant part in ensuring the technology provided was implemented, and added to where needed, to achieve an extremely positive user experience and business case,” says Peach. 

With that deployment now well along, new Deutsche Bank employees have access to their Microsoft 365 applications on their first day at work, and are able to use Microsoft Teams within an hour of their account being enabled. All 130,000 employees, permanent contractors, and vendor staff now use the full Microsoft 365 productivity apps (Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), collaborating via Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

Banking on streamlined, more compliant communications

Georgiou notes that coaxing users into adoption is often a challenge. But this time, being a change agent in a global company yielded a different experience. “There’s often resistance to change,” he explains. “But after hitting a certain critical mass during our Microsoft Teams rollout, we were overwhelmed by demand.” The convenience Deutsche Bank workers experienced is clearly why. “After deploying Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone, we could consolidate all of our communication channels into a single application,” Georgiou says. “We now have more than 60,000 people at Deutsche Bank who use personal mobile devices that amplify flexibility in how they communicate and collaborate, even when they’re on the move.” He looks forward to increasing accessibility for Deutsche Bank workers. “Now we’re considering next steps: application interoperability and notification bots in the system,” he adds. “We’re trialing Microsoft Copilot and other accessibility features, like live captions.” 

Kirk lauds the resulting simplification for client-facing workers: “Our sales teams and other client-facing workers use just one app for all communications,” he says. “With Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone, whether they’re contacting multiple people, internal or external players, their conversations are recorded as needed and compliant with the regulations that we need to observe.” 

For Peach, the cascading benefits of the deployment cross multiple boundaries. “When we moved to Microsoft Teams, we created a level of productivity that translates to universal goals, like increasing revenue streams and realizing greater efficiencies,” he concludes. “We’ve reduced costs across several technology areas. Most of all, embracing a modern platform like Microsoft Teams instilled a level of connection across the globe that we’ve never had before. It’s truly brought Deutsche Bank closer together as an organization than we’ve ever been.” 

 

Checkout our CIONET COOKBOOK

cookbook

Embark on a culinary journey through the ever-evolving world of digital leadership with our third edition of the CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for Digital Success. Unveiling the intricate trilemma faced by today’s Master Chefs, our trailblazing European CIOs address a challenge at the nexus of customer interests, digital transformation strategies, and IT modernisation. Their secret? Synchronising the gearing between customer, business, and technology to create a frictionless movement through the digital landscape.

The CIONET Cookbook uses the analogy of a five-star restaurant to explain the importance of optimally integrated technology, with the CIO as Master Chef. In order to provide the best service to its customers, a top restaurant must have the right atmosphere, an inviting menu, a well-equipped kitchen, talented and committed front-of-house and kitchen staff and smooth-running processes that ensure an enjoyable experience for diners.

CIONET TV

 
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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge

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Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations

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Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking

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José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS

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Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role

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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor

CIONET Reports

 
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Cybersecurity in critical infrastructure

Geopolitical tensions have dominated the headlines for over two years now. In this context, the cyber threat landscape is also evolving rapidly. The protection and security of critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming increasingly important.

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HDS - From Hype to Reality Navigating the Challenges of GenAI

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Integration In An Era Of AI: Challenges And Opportunities

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About CIONET

CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become more at ease and above all more successful in their jobs. So they can do more than just keep up with change but ultimately define it. CIONET opens up a whole new universe of opportunities in IT management.

With the largest membership of corporate digital leaders across Europe, Latin America, US and Australia, CIONET has the expertise and pioneering vision to solve or address any IT management challenge.

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From our local and global events, from our publications and research to our executive education programmes, everything we do is aimed at making sure digital leaders maximise their potential.

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