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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 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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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.

 
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"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.

 

peter van maele
 

“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.

 

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Why Christelijke Mutualiteiten chose OutSystems:
  • Speed-up development and improve agility
  • omnichannel iconDeliver omnichannel CX solutions
  • ux improvement iconImprove 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.

 

rebecca debaillie
 

“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."

 

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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.

 

my cm app promo video

 

"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 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
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Group CIO
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Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
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Stef Schampaert
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Thomas Kessler
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Koen Segers
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Managing Director
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Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
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Directeur général
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Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
CEO
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Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
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Founder - MD
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Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
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Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
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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
Vlera Berishaa (1)
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!