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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 3-7-25 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table - Digital Sovereignty

Digital Sovereignty - Securing Corporate Autonomy in a Fragmented World In an era marked by geopolitical instability and escalating digital dependencies, corporate leaders face a critical imperative: reclaiming control over their digital ecosystems. This exclusive CIONET executive dinner offers a platform for CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders to delve into strategies for achieving digital sovereignty. Key discussion points include: Redefining Digital Sovereignty for Enterprises: Exploring how digital sovereignty extends beyond national borders to encompass corporate control over digital assets, infrastructure, and data. Infrastructure Independence: On-Premises vs. Cloud: Evaluating the trade-offs between on-premises infrastructure and cloud services in the context of control, scalability, and sovereignty. Sovereign AI: Building Autonomous Intelligence: Discussing strategies for developing AI capabilities that align with corporate values and operate independently of external platforms. Vendor Lock-In and Technological Autonomy: Identifying risks of dependency on specific vendors and exploring approaches to achieve technological independence. Investing in Sovereign Digital Capabilities: Strategising investments in infrastructure, talent, and processes to build and sustain digital sovereignty. Join us for an evening of insightful discussions, shared experiences, and actionable strategies to navigate the complexities of digital sovereignty. Secure your organisation's future by understanding and implementing the pillars of digital autonomy.

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Belgium 28-8-25 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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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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July 3, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Własny SOC czy outsourcing? Analiza modeli operacyjnych w bezpieczeństwie IT

Zapraszamy na praktyczną dyskusję o wadach i zaletach różnych modeli utrzymania Security Operations Center. Dawid Wachowiak (TDJ) podzieli się doświadczeniami z wdrożenia i funkcjonowania modelu outsourcingowego. Porozmawiamy o tym, co wpływa na skuteczność SOC-a – od decyzji strategicznej po reakcję na incydent – i jak dopasować model operacyjny do potrzeb organizacji.

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July 14, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Platforma KSEF – Krajowy System eFaktur

Ministerstwo Finansów zapowiedziało wdrożenie platformy KSeF na 2026 rok. Przygotowanie firm i ich systemów wymaga wiedzy o zakresie KSeF i elementach integracji na poziomie IT. Zapraszamy na kontynuację spotkania z udziałem przedstawicieli Centrum Informatyki Resortu Finansów (CIRF) i Ministerstwa Finansów.

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July 16, 2025 Squad Session Physical polish

TRIBES LEADERSHIP CIRCLE

Tribes Leadership Circle to cykliczne, wysokopoziomowe spotkania wyłącznie dla dyrektorów obszarowych, posiadających dostęp w ramach wykupionego członkostwa.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Citizen developers find creative ways to help Shell run safer, smarter and more efficiently with Power Platform

Shell launched a civic development initiative called DIY, short for “Do IT Yourself.” DIY, leaning heavily on the Microsoft Power Platform and the Power Platform Power Apps and Power Automate products, invites and empowers workers with no coding experience to build low-code applications and automate.

Over the course of nearly 200 years, Shell has evolved from a one-man business importing seashells from the Far East to an international energy company with 93,000 employees in more than 70 countries. Today the company explores, produces, refines, and markets oil and natural gas while leading the global transition to a low-carbon energy system.

Shell’s enduring spirit of innovation — anchored by its long-standing commitment to sustainable development — led the company to launch a citizen-development initiative called DIY, an acronym for “Do IT Yourself.” Relying heavily on Microsoft Power Platform, and Power Platform products Power Apps and Power Automate, DIY invites and empowers employees with no coding experience to develop low-code applications, and automation, providing innovative solutions to business problems. The result? Shell estimates that DIY has generated a significant return on investment, enabling efficiencies and cost savings. 

In just a few short years, DIY has revolutionized application development at Shell and positioned the company as an early adopter of low-code technologies. “It’s really a movement within Shell nowadays,” says Anna Sosievici, a Transformational Change Consultant at Shell. “Creating these solutions is not part of most people's day jobs. It's driven by a passion for finding creative ways to solve their business problems.”

Inspiring a DIY movement

Fostering and supporting a culture of low-code self-reliance among non-technical employees at Shell called for a deliberate approach. “It requires employees to upskill, and evolve their capabilities and data sources,” says Paul Kobylanski, who leads citizen development at Shell. “To enable and drive widespread adoption, we first had to win the hearts and minds of our community.”

Once the company leadership bought into the vision, Shell identified champions and advocates throughout the organization — most notably within lines of business. Inspiring success stories were promoted and shared through a central portal that engages and educates the community. “We used bootcamps, persona-based learning paths, and hackathons for ideation,” says Kobylanski. “The process of development was gamified, while showing the art of the possible.”

"We have coaches embedded in every community within our ecosystem,” adds Sosievici. “They provide valuable support to our developers and help launch new capabilities. They are a key part of our DIY initiative."

The emphasis on inspiration and celebration helped to make the program succeed well beyond its initial aspirations. "The original goal was to train five hundred DIY developers," says Kobylanski, "but this has now grown beyond our expectations to over 4,000 active DIY Developers across the business." As awareness of DIY and some high-value applications grew, engagement spread, and communities of practice began to form. “We embraced the philosophy that everyone — wherever they sit in the organization — can improve our operations by developing software applications,” Kobylanski explains. 

Imagining, building, solving

With 4,000 citizen developers (and growing) Shell’s DIY community is making material contributions in a variety of areas. A few examples:

  • Enhancing customer and employee experiences. Customers increasingly need reliable and transparent carbon-footprint data for the products they purchase. DIY developers at Shell created a solution that allows users to easily request an overview of product-related CO2 gas emissions that occur upstream of the product’s delivery to the customer. This streamlined collection and sharing of data — using Power Apps and Power Automate — helps Shell’s customers better understand and manage their CO2 emissions, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Automating manual processes and visualizing data. The Shell Chemicals Park Moerdijk has 20 furnaces that each have 64 burners. Each burner was being manually trimmed to multiple settings to optimize energy consumption. DIY developers built and implemented an application that provides advice on specific trim settings for each furnace, allowing the furnaces to burn at an optimum efficiency — leading to considerable savings and enabling the site to operate more efficiently. The data are stored and shared to Power BI for visualization and to estimate margins.
  • Improving inefficient workflows to save time and money. While building the Shell Polymers Monaca petrochemical complex in western Pennsylvania, Shell contractors had to carry out numerous lifting and hoisting operations. Before each lift could take place the Lifting and Hoisting team had to complete a manual approval process that could take up to 2.5 hours and often required staff to travel across the site. Citizen developers at Shell have made it easier, faster and safer (eliminating travel across the site) with a mobile application — one of the first DIY apps in the Americas — reducing the time to approval by about 40 percent (from 2.5 hours to about one).

“A few years ago, if you were in a business role you knew your process very well, including where they were failing or not as optimized as possible,” says Sosievici. “But you didn’t have the power to make a change unless you could make a strong business case for IT to solve the problem. Nowadays, you can solve it yourself, and that is extremely liberating for people.”

This sense of empowerment is extremely important to Shell, not only in terms of business results, but redefining the traditional roles of business and IT. “People are solving and improving things that are meaningful to them in their daily work,” Kobylanski explains, “and some of them are emerging as great developers on the platform.”. 

“We now recognize DIY as a mode of delivery,” Kobylanski continues. “As we look to prioritize and focus our IT resources on the biggest strategic programs, DIY empowers our businesses to deliver value that IT cannot always get to… which is extremely powerful.”

Looking forward, Kobylanski aims to accelerate adoption even further. “I’d like to see DIY even more widely adopted, like enterprise desktop tools of the past. In addition, I think the future of developing solutions is about to change - from writing lines of code to something more creative where machines build through the power of voice alone. With innovations like Copilot for Power Platform, the possibilities for creative and efficient solution development seem boundless. These are the moments that change the way we look at technology, right?”

 

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Healthcare Circle

Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?

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Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

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Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

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Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
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Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
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Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
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Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
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Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
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Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
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Group IT director
SDWorx
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Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
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Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
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Emmanuel Gob
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DPD
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Pascal Pauwels
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Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
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Group IT Directo
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Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
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Thierry Driesens
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Koen Vandaele
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
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Director General Digital Transformation
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
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Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
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An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
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Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
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Peter Sany
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Executive Advisor
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Team

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Luc Hendrikx
CEO
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Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
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Founder - MD
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Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
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Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
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Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
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Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
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Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
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Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

Contact us

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