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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 Sep 25, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Munich: The Human Edge

Join us for an evening of thought-provoking discussions, real-world use cases, and insights from digital leaders, tech-pioneers and academics as we explore the dynamics of the human-machine relationship.

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Netherlands Sep 25, 2025 Invitation Only Physical dutch

Business Continuity & IT Resilience in 2025: Safeguarding Against Downtime and Disruptions

Alleen op uitnodiging. How can organizations proactively ensure business continuity and IT resilience in 2025 amidst increasing disruptions?

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Germany Sep 29, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: AI & DATA Knowledge Transfer - Briefing 19

Unsere Wissensaustausch-Briefings "AI & Data Knowledge Transfer" zielen darauf ab, CIDOs und Senior Digital Leaders mit praktischen Anwendungen und umsetzbaren Erkenntnissen von Fachexperten zu vermitteln, die den Weg für transformative digitale Reisen ebnen.

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Germany Sep 30, 2025 Country Members Physical german

München: Unstrukturierte Daten – Das verborgene Kapital in deinem Unternehmen

Von der Theorie in die Praxis: Erst Business, dann Bier.Unstrukturierte Daten sind das verborgene Kapital vieler Unternehmen – und zugleich eine der größten Herausforderungen moderner IT. Gemeinsam mit CIOs, CDOs und CTOs der CIONET-Community sprechen wir zuerst bei WeWork München über Strategien, Technologien und echte Use Cases, um dieses Potenzial zu heben. Danach geht's weiter auf die Wiesn – für den offenen Austausch in bayerischer Atmosphäre.  

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UK Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical english

How CIOs drive game-changing results at scale?

This exclusive Jefferson dinner, hosted by Mendix and CIONET, brings together a hand-picked group of senior executives and digital leaders from across the UK financial sector.

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Netherlands Sep 30, 2025 Invitation Only Physical dutch

Vision Dinner From the Network to the Data

Alleen op uitnodiging. Mastering Digital Sovereignty Control, trust and resilience in an era of geopolitical and regulatory shifts. From the Network to the Data.

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Recent Cases

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How RSM Uses Alteryx to Decode Crypto and Blockchain Transactions

RSM, a global tax and audit firm, faced the challenge of processing complex cryptocurrency transactions. Manual methods were time-consuming, error-prone, and hindered efficiency. By adopting Alteryx, RSM automated data extraction, standardization, and analysis, significantly reducing processing time and improving accuracy.

RSM is a global tax and audit firm specializing in assurance, tax and consulting services for middle market leaders. They’ve come a long way from their 1926 beginnings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The company has 57,000 employees in 120 countries who deliver “future-focused technology powered by human insights.”

RSM urges its clients to “experience the power of being understood,” a promise that the company’s employees will take the time to truly understand them, will bring tailored ideas and insight to their environment and will commit to helping them make confident decisions about their future.

 

Establishing standards in the “Wild West”

Cryptocurrency is everywhere. An estimated 400 million people and/or organizations around the world currently hold at least one crypto asset. But because of its obscure and sometimes hidden nature – transactions are tracked on a series of anonymous Blockchain registries – there is a common misconception that crypto assets are not liable for taxes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, tax authorities across the globe are stepping up enforcement efforts around crypto-derived income, placing a burden on individuals and organizations to track transactions and determine tax implications.

Companies who do tax prep have struggled to find an efficient way of analyzing the quickly rising number of cryptocurrency transactions. RSM found themselves in exactly that situation. Their team was taking, on average, two weeks to manually decode 200 transactions with an error rate that hovered around 50%. They knew they needed to find a better way.

“We take data from the blockchain, which is known for being messy, unstandardized, what some people call the Wild West,” says Zack Szykowny, Manager of the Center for Advanced Tax Technology at RSM. “There’s no set ways, just a lot of things that are undetermined.”

The variety of unique wallet addresses and the lack of standardization among the many blockchains created headaches, recalls Alula Zeryihun, Financial Services Tax Manager at RSM. “The manual aspect of the work usually involves people putting together Excel tables that reconcile transactions and activities.”

First off, we said, “How can we empower our people and free them up to do more value-added tasks for our clients instead of sitting there and copying and pasting data? How can we streamline that process?”

The team at RSM turned to Alteryx to help them streamline, decode and standardize all that complex blockchain data. “The question,” Zeryihun says, “was ‘How do you create a standard format so you can categorize all the activities in a manner in which you feel comfortable?’”

To improve RSM’s services to their clients and reduce their reliance on manual processes, Alteryx helped them look for reliable ways to automate. They knew automated analytics could radically reduce both the time and complexity of tracking and analyzing blockchain transactions.

 

Streamlining, Automating, and Saving Time

RSM began working with their team of tax experts to come up with proper categorizations for different types of activities. From there, they formatted and flowed data into a digital tracking app so they could generate all of the tax forms, reports and accompanying documents they needed. Here’s how they did it.

  • RSM asked users to provide one of two types of input depending on their client and their specific needs. If they had a centralized exchange like Coinbase or any of the major US exchanges, they would provide a CSV with all the transactions for their clients. For non-centralized blockchains or wallets, where clients had activity on, they passed along a wallet address which was used to pull the complete transaction history from a blockchain node.
  • Then they connected their RSM-built app to their Alteryx server, allowing them to kick off ETL processes designed for specific exchanges or wallets. The focus was on standardizing the data and getting it into a decoded format.
  • Their output, a standard format with all the proper tax classifications, went straight into the RSM Digital Tracker app and they were able to pull from third-party valuation APIs and calculate the taxes from there.

We were able to streamline the process and create efficiencies. Without Alteryx, it would have been impossible.

Alula Zeryihun

Financial Services Tax Manager, RSM

 

 

All the manual processes that had slowed the team down were gone now, says Szykowny. “It was now feeding into the standard format we have within RSM Digital Tracker. The transformation we’re using Alteryx for is very intricate but then it feeds into standard format, which feeds into our RSM visual tracker. It ultimately produces, in real time, the capital gain loss on all those trades throughout their lifetime – and does it in three different tax methods – and then generates a report that attaches to the tax return.”

The Alteryx impact was profound, Zeryihun says. Tax reports and forms that used to take weeks to compile were now automatically generated and were far more accurate. “With Alteryx, we were able to create a workflow,” Zeryihun says. “Something that would have taken a couple hundred hours to do we are now able to do in less than 10. The end result is happy clients.”

Szykowny stresses the enormity of the time savings. “We’re talking about people downloading and going through 5,000 records at a time.”

 

We're saving our tax teams hundreds of hours and letting them just focus on their analysis. And we’re getting rid of that human error – that's the beauty of automation.

Zack Szykowny

Manager of the Center for Advanced Tax Technology, RSM

 

 

Measuring Transformation with RSM + Alteryx

Alteryx helped RSM move from manual, time-consuming processes, to reliable automation that assists analysts in decoding crypto and blockchain transactions in a matter of minutes. This breakthrough not only made crypto taxation a breeze but held – and continues to hold – immense potential for broader applications beyond tax-related use cases.

The bigger opportunity here, according to Zeryihun, is in enabling standardization and efficiency across the blockchain ecosystem. Manual efforts and reconciliation that are done using traditional Microsoft solutions leave room for improvement. “A powerful software like Alteryx can enable people within this space to be more nimble,” Zeryihun says, “and to do more with less.”

Zeryihun concedes that, before his team could ever get off the ground automating, they had some convincing to do within RSM. “In the early stages of prototyping, Alteryx played a big part in helping us come up with quick workflows and solutions that we could show to people and say, ‘Here’s an example of a minimal viable product that we can put together.’”

Once they had people on board, they were able to democratize and expand their efforts by creating a digital tracker app with a simple front end. That way colleagues didn’t have to be Alteryx experts or even know how to use the tool to derive value from it. “Their day-to-day lives aren’t connected to Alteryx,” Zeryihun says. “But on the back end, we’re able to empower our people through the solutions that we built. That’s a very powerful thing.”

Since the team started working with Alteryx, they’ve gone far beyond their tax use case. “We’re talking to our audit teams, our consulting teams – people within our organizations that are servicing our clients – and we’re coming up with really unique ways of adding value,” Zeryihun says.

Szykowny points to how his team’s breakthroughs in standardizing complicated data have driven confidence and change within the organization. “Having that standardization can help applicability across all different lines of business. It’s one of the biggest challenges we have in anything that’s new, especially in automation. Just getting people comfortable with all that is a unique challenge but change management always is with any sort of automation. Alteryx helps people get to that level of comfort that makes them confident in the output.”

 

 

BENEFITS OF USING ALTERYX
Speed and accuracy

Built repeatable workflows for generating tax reports while radically increasing speed and reducing error rates

Ease of use

Non-data experts at RSM can extract value from the tool, pulling data and building their own simple reports while supporting change management efforts

Broader efficiencies

Began with a single tax team and went on to add value in other departments by stressing efficiency and standardization

Technologies

Alteryx Server

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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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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Get your copy

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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Get your copy

HDS - From Hype to Reality Navigating the Challenges of GenAI

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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:-) ”
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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.”
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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.

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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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