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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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Germany Aug 27, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: Wine Tasting - Unified Operations & Security

Die neuen geo-politischen Veränderungen und unvorhergesehene wirtschaftliche Anforderungen stellen Digital Leader vor neue Herausforderungen. Immer öfter wird in den Vorstandsetagen die Frage gestellt, wie der (IT) Betrieb sicher und ungestört weiter funktionieren kann, wenn regionale Rechenzentren und Infrastrukturen plötzlich nicht mehr verfügbar oder nur teilweise noch einsatzbereit sind. Der CIO muss für diese neue Welt resiliente Strategien parat haben, die für Business Continuity in bisher nicht vorstellbaren politischen und wirtschaftlichen Szenarien ermöglichen.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

With the theme “The Power of Connection,” we’re embracing the essence of meaningful connections within IT and beyond. To honour our tradition, expect an unforgettable evening featuring keynote presentations, open bars, a summer BBQ, and a special experience designed to bring our vibrant community together.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Poland Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical Polish

SUMMER MIXER

SUMMER MIXER

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Germany Sep 9, 2025 Country Members Physical german

Frankfurt: AI Driven Logistics

Vom ersten Use Case zur strategischen Neuausrichtung CIONET lädt bereits zum vierten Mal zu einem exklusiven Roundtable für CIOs und Digitalverantwortliche aus Logistik und Handel ein. Im Mittelpunkt des Abends steht die Frage, wie Unternehmen ihre KI-Initiativen erfolgreich skalieren und aus ersten Use Cases echten strategischen Mehrwert schaffen. Microsoft 365 für Frontline Worker: Moderne Tools, die Mitarbeitende im Tagesgeschäft entlasten ServiceNow für Prozessintegration: Automatisierte End-to-End-Workflows – vom Schadensfall bis zur Retourenabwicklung KI-gestützte Disposition und Planung: Mit smarten Algorithmen zur optimierten Supply Chain Digitale Lieferketten und letzte Meile: Transparenz, Effizienz und Kundenzentrierung durchgängig gedacht

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Belgium Sep 13, 2025 All Members Physical english

CIONET Cycling Event

Join us for a wonderful ride. The ride is accessible to all levels of riders and doesn't require extensive technical skills. More information will follow soon. Looking forward to ride together!

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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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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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Anna Kopp

Head of IT Germany and Regional Office Lead Munich, Microsoft

“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:-) ”
Mauricio Amaro

Mauricio Amaro

IT Director, IT Thinker

“The main things that I would like to get from our community of Digital Leaders are: networking, share experiences, share best practices and successful cases, and comments and recommendations about providers.”
Vijay Anand

Vijay Anand

Vice president IT & Compliance, VisionaryRCM (A Carlyle Grp Company)

“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.

Why join CIONET?

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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stories, experiences, and ideas around our shared mission.

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from our exclusive events, publications and research.

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inspiration, thought-provoking conversations, expert perspectives and exclusive first-hand content each and every day

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and make better, more well-informed decisions on how to lead your digital business.

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your potential. Realise your ambitions.

About CIONET

Join CIONET

We'd love to welcome you as the newest member of our CIONET community where Digital Leaders unite. 

You can either send us a registered handwritten letter explaining why you'd like to become a member or you can simply talk to us right here!

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Would you like to know more about CIONET, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!