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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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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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Germany Nov 11, 2025 Country Members Physical english

München: The Agentic Advantage

On the eve of the ServiceNow World Forum, CIONET invites you to an exclusive dinner in the fabulous Restaurant Little London in the heart of Munich City. Join leading CIOs, CDOs, and ServiceNow product owners for a candid exchange on how to get the most from your ServiceNow investment.

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Switzerland Nov 12, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Zurich: Mastering Digital Sovereignty

CIONET invites you to a private dinner with a select group of enterprise CIOs and senior infrastructure leaders in Zurich – part of a multi-country dialogue series with IT executives across Europe. This strategic dialogue is designed for digital leaders to share insights on one of the most pressing challenges facing today's leaders: How can organisations build true digital sovereignty in the face of geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory pressure, and growing technological dependencies?

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Germany Nov 13, 2025 Country Members Physical german

Frankfurt: CIDO Women - Female Leadership Circle

Bauen Sie mit uns ein starkes Netzwerk führender WOMEN CIDOs aus der IT- und Technologiebranche auf! Unser zweites Treffen findet im PwC Experience Center in Frankfurt statt.

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Belgium Nov 13, 2025 Country Members Physical english

The New CISO - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

The Role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is no longer confined to securing the network perimeter. As organisations become more digitally connected and data-driven, the CISO’s responsibilities have expanded far beyond traditional security measures. Today’s CISO must not only defend against cyber threats but also enable the business to innovate securely, manage complex regulatory environments, and instill a culture of trust across the organisation. This event will explore the evolving role of the CISO as a strategic leader who balances security with business enablement. As digital transformation accelerates, how can CISOs align their security strategies with organisational goals, ensure compliance, and lead their teams in the fight against increasingly sophisticated threats? Key Discussion Points: From Gatekeeper to Strategic Partner: How CISOs can shift from being seen as barriers to innovation to becoming key enablers of business agility and transformation through security. Balancing Risk and Innovation: Learn how top CISOs navigate the delicate balance between mitigating risk and supporting the organisation’s need to innovate and scale in a secure environment. Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC): Explore how CISOs are managing an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, ensuring compliance while still driving business objectives forward. Building a Security-First Culture: Practical strategies for CISOs to foster a culture where security is embedded into every part of the business, from boardroom discussions to frontline operations. CISO as Crisis Manager: How to prepare for and lead your organisation through major cybersecurity incidents. From ransomware attacks to data breaches, we’ll discuss how today’s CISO is as much a crisis manager as they are a strategist. Why You Should Attend: As a CISO, your role is evolving faster than ever before. This event is designed to provide you with actionable insights into how to embrace your expanded responsibilities while keeping your organisation safe and secure. Whether you’re focused on aligning security with business goals, navigating regulatory challenges, or leading in times of crisis, this event will equip you with the strategies to lead the next era of cybersecurity.

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UK Nov 13, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

Engineering the AI-Native enterprise: From legacy burden to innovation engine

Join us on November 13th for the exclusive roundtable powered by Cognizant.

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Recent Cases

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Global fashion leader increases revenue with better data

Burberry uses Databricks & Snowplow to create real-time customer profiles (AI-Ready Customer 360) for personalized service. Faster data insights (no more daily batches) improve in-store recommendations and marketing ROI. The platform respects customer privacy with server-side cookies and GDPR compliance.

“A shopper who browses products on Burberry.com is telling us something about what she really wants. Thanks to Databricks and Snowplow, we can build an AI-Ready Customer 360 so our client advisors have that information from the moment she walks into our store — and can deliver a personalized NextGen CX.”

— Benjamin Stephens, Senior Manager, Decision Analytics, Burberry
 
 

Burberry is a global luxury brand with a rich British heritage. The company has 413 stores worldwide and plans to keep growing by providing an outstanding, personalized customer experience. Until recently, this goal was difficult to achieve due to extensive data processing delays which prevented the company from analyzing clickstream data from Burberry.com in a timely fashion. By implementing the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow’s Behavioral Data Platform, Burberry formed a complete view of each customer (AI-Ready Customer 360). In-store client advisors can now pull up information about opted-in customers’ latest online behavior on their phones and tablets — which helps them deliver a truly superior customer experience (NextGen CX).

Daily clickstream data batches arrived too late to be useful

Whether they’re looking for the iconic Burberry trench coat or another luxury clothing item, shoppers around the world flock to Burberry stores for a personalized experience. But many browse the company’s offerings online first, a practice known as webrooming. Burberry analyzes online user behavior to determine how they can best improve their service and increase sales. For years, the company pulled clickstream data from a cloud-based data warehouse — but wanted more precise control over data delivery.

“With our data warehouse, we would receive the previous day’s data anywhere between 2:00 and 7:00 PM GMT,” recalled Benjamin Stephens, Senior Manager, Decision Analytics at Burberry. “Although that delivery schedule works for many businesses, we at Burberry are in a constant race to activate our web data so that we can pass it along to our client advisors in stores, worldwide. That kind of speed is essential to offering the level of service for which Burberry is known.”

Burberry also needed greater visibility into their data. The company’s data warehouse automatically pre-aggregated and sanitized Burberry’s data, which made it difficult to trust the details about customer visits. Burberry also needed to validate their web data regularly to ensure it was actionable.

“The more deeply we dug into our data, the less confident we felt in our ability to form conclusions,” said Stephens. “Simple requests such as, ‘What happened on the website yesterday?’ were going unanswered. We often faced the choice of either making a quick decision or making a good one.”

 

Better, faster data enables machine learning models to drive NextGen CX

To address these challenges, Burberry implemented the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow’s Behavioral Data Platform (BDP). The solutions enable Burberry to deliver a NextGen CX based on reliable, high-quality data. As clickstream data flows in from Burberry.com, the company uses Snowplow BDP to realize real-time AI-Ready Customer 360s from across their digital touchpoints. From there, the data travels into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which contains 40 personalized models covering tasks such as product recommendations, propensity scoring and lifetime value. These models instantly recalculate the data before sending it to the company’s action system.

“A NextGen CX program is only as good as the speed and accuracy of the data you can get from it,” Stephens explained. “With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow BDP, we’ve broken free from daily data batches and formed an accurate real-time view of our customers’ digital activity. Our personalized models automatically stay up-to-date by consuming behavioral data. And throughout the process, Snowplow helps us safeguard data privacy by giving us total control over how much information we collect from customers and enabling us to track user consent.”

Burberry also gained a more accurate view of their marketing ROI by refining their approach to marketing attribution. The company used Snowplow to refine their business definitions for all their marketing activities and taxonomies. Using the dbt plug-in for Databricks, Burberry gathered additional detail from their referral sources, consent banners and server-side cookies. As a result, the company has migrated onto a rich and fully owned marketing foundation that uses a simple attribution model to understand what’s working in near-time.

“Using behavioral data from Snowplow, we’ve formed a last-click attribution view that incorporates some of the many variables from our work,” Stephens added. “We’ve gotten much smarter about how we create our data lead attribution models, which will help us make better decisions about where to invest our marketing spend in the future.”

 

Driving a NextGen CX with powerful personalization

After implementing Databricks and Snowplow, Burberry has overcome many of their longstanding personalization challenges. Previously, the company faced a severe limitation in using cookies because the Safari browser limits cookie duration to seven days. After switching to server-side cookies with Snowplow, Burberry’s cookies are now valid for 12 months. Best of all, server-side cookies are much better than third-party cookies for respecting customer privacy and adhering to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — top priorities for Burberry.

“Going from one week to one year for our anonymous cookies is a ridiculous uplift,” said Stephens. “When we can hang onto a user for up to a year, there’s a much greater likelihood that they will identify themselves at some point by clicking on an email. That enables us to tie their history back to an actual customer and begin to provide them with more personalized service.”

Burberry’s focus on offering better service to webrooming customers has also paid off. The average webrooming journey lasts two to six hours from the time a Burberry customer begins browsing online to the time they arrive at a Burberry store. With Databricks and Snowplow, Burberry delivers data to their client advisors in time for them to provide knowledgeable service based on the online behavior of opted-in customers.

“Our client advisors can pull out their iPad or iPhone devices to gain an instant view of what a customer really wants and which products to recommend,” Stephens remarked. “That’s crucial to making sales, because if we miss that opportunity, we may have to wait another week or two until the customer returns. There’s no chance we would be able to support this use case if we were still getting our clickstream data in daily batches.”

The synergy between Databricks and Snowplow allows Burberry to consume clickstream data on their own schedule, rather than the schedule of their data provider. “We’re working on getting data latency down to five minutes, which is huge for a business like ours,” Stephens concluded. “Snowplow enabled us to replace multiple data sources and their transformations with a single set of definitions. And we lean on Databricks to combine many different behaviors from different sources and at different cadences. This is the beginning of a whole new age of customer service at Burberry.”

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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Giuseppe Ficara - The Untold Story of Amplifon's Data & AI Transformation

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Jesús Oliva, Head of Data & AI at Moeve - From Data Challenges to AI Leadership

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Radosław Maćkiewicz - CEO at COI - Empowering Citizens Through Digital Innovation

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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

CIONET Reports

 
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How CIOs drive game changing results at scale?

The role of the CIO has evolved from managing systems to shaping outcomes: growth, resilience, and competitive edge are now won or lost in the technology arena. Today ’ s CIOs must balance stability with innovation, control costs while attracting scarce talent, and modernise legacy infrastructure while adopting emerging technologies.

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A research proposal_AI and the Human Experience

As AI transitions from a specialised tool to an all-pervasive force, understanding its profound implications for our human lives is no longer merely academic but an urgent imperative for social well-being and strategic preparedness.

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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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“The CIONET App allows us to learn from eachother and and find the courage to be authentic by hearing stories from others! Thanks to Tobias and the whole team for bringing us together:-) ”
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“The CIONET app provides a really cool platform to network and share insights.”

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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with digital leaders who share your interests, who face the same challenges, who care about the same topics.

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