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Belgium 11-12-25 Country Members Physical english

Next Generation Digital Twins - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Imagine being able to monitor, simulate, and optimise an entire city, factory, or supply chain in real time. Next-generation digital twins are making this vision a reality, transforming how we manage and understand complex systems. By creating dynamic virtual replicas of physical assets and processes, digital twins allow organisations to predict issues, optimize performance, and make data-driven decisions with unprecedented accuracy.This event will explore how digital twins are being used across industries to revolutionize the way we operate and maintain large-scale, intricate systems—whether it’s the infrastructure of a smart city, the efficiency of a factory floor, or the resilience of global supply chains.Examples of Digital Twins in Action:Smart Cities: Urban planners can use digital twins to simulate traffic flow, monitor energy usage, or predict the impact of weather events on infrastructure. This enables cities to optimize resources and improve the quality of life for their citizens.Factories of the Future: Manufacturing plants are leveraging digital twins to monitor equipment in real time, prevent downtime, and optimize production lines. With predictive analytics, factories can avoid costly breakdowns and improve overall efficiency.Supply Chain Management: Complex supply chains, spanning continents and industries, can be modeled as digital twins to track shipments, simulate disruptions, and optimize logistics. Businesses can reduce inefficiencies and respond faster to market demands.Key Themes:Real-Time Monitoring and Simulation: How digital twins provide real-time insights into complex systems, allowing for dynamic response and optimization.Predictive Power: Leveraging AI and data analytics, digital twins help organisations predict and mitigate issues before they happen, from equipment failures to supply chain bottlenecks.Scalability Across Ecosystems: Digital twins aren’t limited to individual assets—learn how they can be scaled across entire ecosystems like smart cities or global supply chains for maximum impact.Building Trust and Security: With digital twins handling critical infrastructure and sensitive data, what are the security and governance frameworks needed to ensure trust in these virtual systems?Why You Should Attend:Next-generation digital twins are no longer just a concept—they are revolutionizing industries by offering a new way to manage complexity. Whether you’re looking to optimize a city, factory, or supply chain, this event will provide practical insights into how digital twins can transform your organisation’s operations and drive future innovation.

Belgium 12-12-25 Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

Everyone wants value for money. But in IT, that value is spread across infrastructure, software, services, and people. Your infra spend is creeping up. App maintenance is eating your budget. New development is exciting but comes with hidden overhead. And people costs, from operations to engineering, remain the largest, most overlooked slice. If you’re under pressure to optimise without compromise, this session brings the right questions, trade-offs, and shared lessons to the table.

Belgium 16-12-25 Invitation Only Physical english

CIONET Round Table: Mastering Enterprise Service Management

This CIONET Round Table will focus on how the IT department can be the enabler that unlocks organisational efficiencies and helps to improve the employee experience. We will explore how CIOs and Digital Leaders can fundamentally transform the internal service experience by breaking down organizational silos, orchestrating complex cross-functional workflows, and leveraging a unified platform to deliver a truly frictionless experience for every employee.

December 12, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Managing IT Cost Without Losing Capability ; A practical look at how to control infrastructure, apps, and dev spend

January 13, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Moving Legacy Systems to the Cloud Efficiently : Balancing cost, risk, and continuity in complex migrations

Migrating legacy systems to the cloud remains one of the toughest balancing acts in IT. Every choice affects stability, cost, and trust at once, and what starts as a modernisation effort quickly turns into a negotiation between ambition and reality. Suddenly budgets rise, dependencies appear late, and timelines tighten as old architectures collide with new expectations. In the end, success depends on sequencing, ownership, and aligning business priorities with infrastructure limits, and not only on technical readiness. Making it work requires more than a plan on paper. Knowing which systems genuinely belong in the cloud, which can wait, and which should stay put shapes the entire roadmap and defines its success. Each refactoring decision sets the level of future flexibility, but it also drives cost and risk. The trade-offs between speed, sustainability, and resilience only become clear once migration begins and pressure builds. Let’s discuss how to plan migrations that stay on track, manage hidden dependencies, and handle downtime with confidence. Let’s also discuss how governance, testing, and vendor coordination keep progress visible and credible. Are you in? A closed conversation for those who turn cloud migration from a disruption into a long-term advantage.

January 22, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

AI-Driven Development: Redesigning workflows, responsibilities, and trust in the age of automation

AI coding assistants entered development teams quietly, but their impact grows by the day. What started as autocomplete now shapes architecture decisions, documentation, and testing. And when productivity gains are visible, so are new risks: security blind spots, uneven quality, and the slow erosion of shared standards. Teams move faster, but not always in the same direction. The challenge has become integration rather than adoption. And new questions have risen: how do you blend automation into established practices without losing oversight? When is human review still essential, and what should the rules of collaboration between developer and machine look like? As AI tools learn from proprietary code, where do responsibility and accountability sit? Let’s talk about how to redefine those workflows, balancing creativity with control, and protecting code quality in a hybrid human-AI environment. A closed conversation on where AI accelerates progress, where it introduces new debt, and how development culture must evolve to stay credible.

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CM Drives Omnichannel Strategy Supporting 4.5M Members

Christelijke Mutualiteiten (CM) is Belgium’s largest health insurance fund, serving 4.5 million customers. Having used OutSystems for 18 months, the development team took on its biggest challenge yet—to deliver CM's omnichannel customer experience solution.

"I was a believer in OutSystems from the beginning, and it has lived up to my expectations. We deliver faster, and our users and customers appreciate the improved user experiences we now serve them." - Rebecca DebaillieDirector ICT, Christelijke Mutualiteiten

Challenge

Omnichannel Calls for a Modern AppDev Approach

Christelijke Mutualiteiten ("CM") is the largest of five competing Belgian health insurance funds with four and a half million members—roughly half of the country's citizens. The company acts as patients' representative with healthcare providers and administers claims, payments, and social assistance for its members, within the Belgian state's compulsory health scheme.

CM describes itself as a "dynamic social movement," rather than just an insurance institution, a claim warranted by its 70,000 volunteers who provide social care assistance in their communities.

Established in 1906, CM has an extensive network of around 500 branches so that members never need to travel far to access CM services. But more recently, with an eye to the future, CM has invested significantly in improved digital experiences to meet the changing preferences of its members.

The quest for world-class digital experiences placed an increasing burden on CM's IT organization, which was struggling to keep up with demand, as Chief Architect, Peter Van Maele, explains.

“CM's back-end development is mostly in Java. But for front-end development and workflows, we needed a faster approach, one that would help us iteratively improve user experiences at a fast pace and make us less reliant on hard-to-hire senior Java development skills.” - Peter Van MaeleChief Architect, Christelijke Mutualiteiten

Peter's search for faster, modern application development methods brought him to OutSystems, and following an extensive evaluation, CM became an OutSystems customer in mid-2018.

Why Christelijke Mutualiteiten chose OutSystems:

Speed-up development and improve agility
Deliver omnichannel CX solutions
Improve UX

Solution

Year One—Building Foundations

CM has hundreds of applications and around 300 developers. The business case for adopting OutSystems depended on wide scale adoption—this was not about building one or two urgent things fast. "Our first year was about establishing foundations," explains Peter.

CM needed a governed, architectural approach that would maximize the reuse of components. Scalability and security were crucial, given the financial details and health data it processes for millions of customers.

OutSystems partner Providit provided training and advice on software architecture. Meanwhile, Rebecca Debaillie, Director of ICT, started building CM's internal OutSystems development capability.

“During the first year, we took an ambassadorial approach, gradually building the evidence of how much faster and more flexible it was to develop front-ends and workflow-style apps using OutSystems. It was never a case of forcing OutSystems on our experienced developers.” - Rebecca DebaillieDirector ICT, Christelijke Mutualiteiten

The first strategic application that the team developed was "Care Volunteering," an Uber-like application that assigns social-care tasks, such as home visits and medicine deliveries, to CM's 70,000 volunteers.

Built by an agile team of seven, including two OutSystems developers, this web portal and mobile-friendly web app for volunteers enables CM to manage clients, care requirements, and volunteers and even provides required reports to the Belgian social services department. External volunteer users gain secure access to the system thanks to integration with Belgium's eID service.

"Development involved integration to back-end systems written in COBOL and Java," says Peter. "We've reused these integrations in subsequent development projects."

Partner

Providit NV

Providit, established in 2015 and founded by Kurt Vandevelde and Tim Timperman, has a 100% focus on OutSystems. Tim and Kurt have been working with the OutSystems platform since 2010 and have by far...

Learn more about Providit NV

Results

Year Two—Omnichannel Takes-off with My CM

Although CM now has 27 OutSystems applications in production, the most strategic of these is "My CM," which aims to provide every customer service capability that had previously required customers to visit stores or call the contact center.

"This project is all about giving our customers more choice for how they interact with CM," explains Rebecca. "And, for many of our customers, using a mobile app or a web portal is now preferable to picking up the phone or visiting a store."

CM's board set a demanding deadline for this strategic project. The IT team had just nine months to deliver the omnichannel suite of applications, including native mobile apps on iOS and Android, a customer-facing web portal, and the internal customer service app.

Given that 4.5 million customers would ultimately use My CM, performance speed and user experience were crucial design considerations.

"From an architecture perspective, we were integrating with, not replacing, systems of record," explains Peter. "Much of the project was spent building the strong foundations needed for this business-critical application suite. User experience development was mainly in the second half of the project."

CM was able to speed up development by using OutSystems UI—an extensive library of responsive visual components and screen templates that enabled the team to customize UI standards across the application suite.

Thanks to the OutSystems platform's rapid visual development capabilities, the CM development team was able to take user feedback in its stride. A UX design agency provided continuous input from a panel of customers of all ages.

“It was essential that all CM customers find the app easy to use, so we made sure to include over-seventies in our user test panel.” - Rebecca DebaillieDirector ICT, Christelijke Mutualiteiten

Five OutSystems developers were involved in the My CM project—two from CM and three from Providit. The team delivered on time; overall development time was nine months, of which UI development with OutSystems was four months.

"Early on in our OutSystems journey, we did some development speed comparisons with Java. OutSystems was 40 percent faster," explains Peter. "If we'd not been using OutSystems, we'd have needed at least eight developers to deliver the same functionality in the time available."

The My CM app was rolled out to customers in phases, starting in early 2021. Feedback and ratings have been extremely positive—App Store 4.7 and Google Play 4.5.

Technologies

Outsystems

CIONET Business Circles

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?

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.

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 !

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.