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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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Upcoming Events

 
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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 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

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.

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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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August 5, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI Act – praktyka stosowania na rynku polskim

AI Act – dyrektywa unijna regulująca wiele zasad wykorzystania AI w modelach biznesowych- już obowiązuje na polskim rynki. Ciekawe są prawdziwe i realne przypadki jej stosowania. Spójrzmy na temat od strony regulacyjnej, czyli prawnej. Ale zobaczmy praktykę aktywnej w temacie kancelarii prawnej. Zaprosiliśmy mecenaskę Aleksandrę Maciejewicz z kancelarii Lawmore, która od dłuższego czasu jest niezwykle aktywna i praktykuje w tym temacie. Poznamy podstawę prawną, praktyczne case’y i opis sytuacji oczami prawdziwego praktyka.

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August 6, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

DORA: wszystko, co chcielibyście wiedzieć, a baliście się zapytać

Michał Kulesza, adwokat, partner w departamencie technologicznym kancelarii Rymarz Zdort Maruta i szef zespołu regulacji ICT, przeprowadzi nas przez kluczowe wątki rozporządzenia i zmierzy się z pytaniami zgłoszonymi przez uczestników. Omówimy zarówno krytyczne aspekty na początku wdrożeń, jak i dostrajanie zmian na poziomie organizacyjnym i strategicznym. Masz konkretny temat, który warto poruszyć? Zgłoś go w trakcie rejestracji. Zamiast czytać między wierszami DORA – porozmawiajmy o tym wprost.

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August 7, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Automated Systems Testing

Duże tempo developmentu i dokonywanych zmian wymaga nowej klasy testowania. Jakość systemów obserwowana na produkcji będzie pochodną skuteczności tego procesu. Duże nadzieje wiążemy z platformami wspierającymi testowanie i opartymi na AI. Sesja ta pokaże, gdzie jesteśmy w poszukiwaniu takich rozwiązań i gdzie ewaluuje myślenie szefów testów i ich rozwiązania organizacyjne.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Toyota Motor Europe: Building a happier workplace by putting people first

The name Toyota has long been synonymous with innovation and excellence, known across the world for pushing boundaries and pioneering new ways of thinking. The hybrid workplace has become a reality and Toyota Motor Europe is using the Microsoft 365 suite of tools to usher in not only new ways of working, but a new way of thinking too.

“Our mission at Toyota is to ‘produce happiness for all’. What we’re doing now is part of that mission.”

Tine Slabbinck, Manager of the Business Productivity team at Toyota Motor Europe, is talking about the seismic transition happening within her company as it transitions from traditional carmaker to innovative mobility company.

“If you look at the recent Olympic Games, you see a lot of mobility solutions that Toyota is now providing that aren’t in the traditional car manufacture space,” Slabbinck continues. “That all ties in to our overall mission.” It is a mission that is being supported by a new guiding framework called the five Cs – Courage, Curiosity, Collaboration, Creativity and Coaching – which is helping the company keep up with changes happening both in the automotive industry and more broadly.

For Slabbinck, her team’s interpretation of the framework is about more than just technology though: “I’ve always tried to find projects that make a difference on the human aspect. Just the technology side of things is not enough for me.

“So what we are doing with Microsoft Teams is maybe a little outside of IT,” she continues. “It is about change management, it is about explaining things in a simple way, having patience and empathy, and ultimately trying to make a difference on a human level.”

A company keen to adopt a new approach

Since it was established in 1937, Toyota has become a household name across the world and a byword for quality, efficiency and innovation in car manufacturing space. More recently, that space has expanded into mobility more broadly.

Its European arm, Toyota Motor Europe (TME) is headquartered in Belgium and operates in 29 European countries, employing some 25,000 people. “We have over 69 nationalities working in TME, so it’s a very international company,” says Slabbinck.

“Organizationally too, there are different cultures,” she adds. “You have the sales area where there is a specific culture, and then the manufacturing plants where there is a huge emphasis on efficiency. It's great to have these different mentalities, this diversity; gender-wise, nationality-wise, but also organizationally. That's what makes it really interesting to work here.”

Slabbinck’s Business Productivity team focuses on supporting employees across the TME network to embrace new ways of working, especially how they use digital tools. “Our team mission is to increase user adoption of the Microsoft 365 digital workplace,” she explains. That user adoption spans the whole suite of Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, SharePoint and Outlook.

But the adoption approach isn’t just using tech for tech’s sake. “One of the key principles that drives our approach is including the user voice,” she says.

“We really try to get close to our users, and bridge the human gap,” she adds. “I’d say we’re pioneers in that.”

Accelerating adoption during COVID-19

Using digital tools to enhance productivity and collaboration is not a new pursuit for Toyota. The company was an early adopter of cloud-based tools and was already planning to move to something akin to a hybrid workplace in 2019.

“The company had just announced we would be working remotely two days a week,” recalls Slabbinck. “So we were busy preparing for that, getting everything in place, when COVID-19 happened.” 

What had previously been a strategic decision to embrace remote working, suddenly became a necessity. “We had daily crisis meetings because we weren't too sure what was going to happen,” she recalls. “We'd never had that many people working from home before.” 

And while the early days were focused on ensuring firewalls could support the new setup and the basics were covered, the team quickly turned their attention to the wellbeing of TME employees. “We did regular surveys together with HR on how people were feeling using Microsoft Forms,” Slabbinck says. “And the surveys were about more than just IT. We used smiley faces for people to tell us how they were feeling, how happy they were. It was very important for us to understand that in the beginning. 

The team also realized that there was much more openness to some of the tools. “There had been some resistance pre-pandemic to SharePoint and even Teams. But suddenly, people changed their mindset and realized how useful they are. It gave us a lot of momentum to drive user adoption. 

“That was when we started to do some really interesting things with our partner Rapid Circle,” she adds. “In our plants, for example, it was crucial during the pandemic to keep the presence on the shopfloor. Through Teams video meetings on a mobile phone with a stabilizer, the meeting attendees felt like they were on the shopfloor, even if they weren’t. 

“And we found that the live Teams meetings with video enabled faster sharing of best practices to a larger audience, so it was even an improvement from before.”

Improving the way people collaborate 

The team at TME had already established a strategy to encourage user adoption of Microsoft 365 tools before the pandemic happened.

“The strategy had a few important pillars,” explains Slabbinck. “One of those was ‘digital influencers’. The influencers existed before COVID, but they weren’t particularly active,” says Michiel Dröge, Business Consultant at Microsoft partner Rapid Circle. “So that was one of the areas we wanted to improve. 

To do this, they used Microsoft SharePoint to establish a broader community. “We established the Know It community, a portal on Teams and SharePoint where people can find key information about the Microsoft 365 tools with FAQ's and videos,” says Slabbinck. “It’s a space for employees to ask questions and for our digital influencers to contribute and guide people.”

“We used Microsoft reporting tools to look at data from users and the influencers, to think of ways to enhance engagement,” says Dröge. “That’s how we came up with the webinar program, and got the insights to improve some of the sites where we publish information.” 

“One webinar series was focused on My Analytics, which we launched during the pandemic,” says Katarzyna Slomka, Business Productivity Specialist at TME, who led the webinar series. “There was that need to support people to focus their time, to understanding their own working style. 

“We made everything clearer for people, more streamlined,” adds Dröge. “And that is helping people to start to use new tools. Many employees have started using Teams together with Planner, for example. And they’re finding that Planner really helps them to visualize their tasks and work in a new, more agile way.”

Bridging the space between IT and HR

An important aspect of the way that Toyota Motor Europe is using technology, is seeing it not in isolation, but as part of a wider organizational transformation. “There are a lot of initiatives that Toyota has been doing that are connected to IT support,” says Dröge. “But we want to relate them to broader HR themes around change management, to focus on really making people happier and secure with their workplace and supporting them to collaborate in better ways.” 

“We are transforming from a car company to a Digital Mobility provider,” says Kylie Jimenez, Senior Vice President of People, Technology and Corporate Affairs at Toyota Motor Europe. 

“This transformation is about creating products, systems and services to produce mass happiness for all. Not just for Toyota customers, but for the good of society. While some of this is hardwired into Toyota DNA, there is an aspect of cultural transformation that is still required.   

“This has brought our IT&D, HR and Administrative functions closer to focus on collaboration, open sharing and innovation. Together we aim to inspire and enable the change for the organization by painting a picture of what is possible and then enabling it with the right digital workplace tools and resources.”

And as the company pivots to a new era, it is keen to invite its employees to redefine how the changing working environment can improve and facilitate the way the company collaborates. Ideas are being called for on how meeting rooms are refurbished and a series of workshops has been organized to ‘hack the future of collaboration at TME.’ The best ideas gathered from the workshops will be pitched to senior staff at TME and funded, as the company transitions to a new way of working that straddles physical and virtual spaces. 

A new mindset for the hybrid workplace 

Like many companies across the world, Toyota Motor Europe now faces the challenge of establishing the hybrid workplace in a more permanent form. One aspect of that has been the creation of a jointly defined digital roadmap.
 
“We’ve focused on building a roadmap for the hybrid workplace together with the users and our internal IT stakeholders – and Microsoft Teams is a central part of that,” says Slabbinck.
 
“Teams is helping us so much with having a smooth collaboration with external stakeholders, as well as internally for employees. Collaboration is smooth because of all the tools that we have that work with Teams. So if we want to boost creativity, we need to make sure that we can have Teams meetings where people can whiteboard ideas, where they can vote on ideas using Microsoft Forms.
 
“It’s crucial to have these tools accessible if we want to continue to be innovative in whatever we do in the future,” she adds. “Teams makes that possible.”
 
Even as more and more employees return to the workplace, there is flexibility about how and when people come in. “The guidance from HR is that you should come to the office 40-60% of your time. What this means in practice is that most meetings will still be Teams meetings, because having everybody in the same location will probably not happen so often.
 
“So there's a lot of work being done by our HR colleagues on hybrid working,” she continues. “Like the webinar they organized yesterday. It was all about wellbeing and psychology, about the importance of disconnecting, about doing breathing exercises, about having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.
 
“It goes to show how our company is really evolving in the way it approaches the workplace, and what it means to belong to this company.”

Technologies

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Partners

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

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Team

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Tribe Master
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Junior Event Manager
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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!