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Belgium 21-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

From Victim to Victor: Cyber resilience is a means, providing Business Continuity the goal

In an era where every outage, audit, and cyberattack is a test of organisational survival, resilience has become the new currency of trust. While traditional perimeter security with: firewalls, intrusion detection, and scanners, remains essential, it is no longer a sufficient guarantee against modern threats that bypass these layers to penetrate your core systems. Today, enterprises require security and continuity that are built-in, not bolted-on. This CIONET roundtable focuses on the shift from reactive disaster recovery to proactive Business Continuity. Together with experts from HPE Zerto, we will explore how organisations can transform their recovery strategies into seamless continuity models.

Belgium 23-4-26 Country Members Physical & Virtual english

CIOFEST BELGIUM: Leadership in the Agentic Era

AI is no longer confined to supporting human tasks. We are entering the agentic era, where autonomous systems act on behalf of people and organisations. These agents can gather information, make decisions, negotiate terms, and even complete transactions. The implications extend well beyond technology; they touch the very foundations of business models, governance, and leadership. For CIOs and their peers, the rise of “machine customers” and autonomous partners poses new questions: Market impact: How do you compete and create value when some customers and suppliers are machines? Governance: What trust, compliance, and accountability structures are needed when AI acts independently in financial, procurement, or customer-facing processes? Leadership: How should CIOs guide their organisations in redefining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making when agents take over parts of the value chain?Business strategy: What opportunities emerge for new revenue models, platforms, and ecosystems shaped by autonomous interaction? This session shifts the focus from the mechanics of AI agents to the decisions that will shape leadership in the next decade. It is a call for CIOs to prepare for a future where relationships, markets, and strategies are no longer limited to human-to-human interactions, but also extend to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.

Belgium 29-4-26 Invitation Only Physical english

Building Future-Ready Application Ecosystems in the Age of Intelligent Automation

This CIONET workshop is a collaborative deep-dive into the practicalities of"rewiring the building" while it’s still occupied. Drawing onKyndryl’s deep heritage in mission-critical infrastructure and their latestresearch, we will dismantle the "hidden costs" of legacyenvironments. The conversation will focus on the transition from static,monolithic structures to composable architectures that allow intelligent agentsto operate seamlessly across hybrid landscapes.

April 2, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual english

Taming the SaaS Sprawl: Tracking spend, ownership, and usage before it slips out of control

SaaS gave business units freedom: quick onboarding, no infrastructure, and instant results. But over time, that freedom turned into fragmentation. Each team now buys, renews, and configures its own stack. HR has one platform, finance has another, and marketing probably has ten. The invoices keep coming, usage keeps dropping, and no one is sure who’s accountable for what.

May 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Product-Centric IT 2.0: Blending product and project thinking

Everyone says they’ve gone product-centric. In reality, most organisations live in a hybrid world where projects, products, and platforms overlap. Teams manage releases while still chasing deadlines, and governance still thinks in milestones rather than outcomes. The shift is underway, but the mindset hasn’t caught up.

May 19, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

AI vs AI in Cybersecurity: When defenders and attackers both use AI

The game has changed, clearly. Attackers have AI, defenders have AI, and both sides are learning faster than anyone expected, or maybe the attackers are just a bit faster. What used to take hours now happens in seconds, and detection windows close before alerts even appear. It’s adaptation beyond automation, and no one gets to sit still.

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Total Produce Delivers Daily Fruit to UK Schools With OutSystems

Having won the UK government Fruit4Schools contract, Total Produce encountered a problem. In order to ensure payment for deliveries under the contract. Working with OutSystems gave Total Produce the speed and agility to provide not only this solution, but many more since.

"It’s not just faster development. The DevOps capabilities of OutSystems, like one-click deployment and performance monitoring, mean the apps we deliver this way are less costly to update and maintain. That means we can invest more in innovation that will keep the company competitive into the future."Tony O’Halloran, Director of IT, Total Produce

An Upset to the Apple Cart

Challenge – Total Produce is one of the world’s largest providers of fresh produce, with operations in 26 countries and 140 facilities across Europe, India, and North America. The company is involved in growing, sourcing, importing, packaging, and distributing over 300 lines of fresh produce, from apples to zucchini and everything in between. However, as this story shows, sometimes it’s the last-mile delivery that can be most difficult.

When the UK government awarded the Fruit4Schools contract to Total Produce, it came with a stipulation:

Provide every primary school child a piece of fruit every day, but if you can’t prove delivery with a signature, we won’t pay you.

From bitter experience, Total Produce knew that paper-based signatures were a recipe for disaster. Missing delivery slips, manual processing, and the impossibility of real-time reporting could quickly turn this prestigious contract into a loss-making venture.

Total Produce needed a mobile app that could route drivers to each school and collect signatures for each delivery. That was the challenge thrown at the Total Produce busy IT department, together with what seemed like an impossible deadline.

Tony O’Halloran, Director of IT at Total Produce, takes up the story. “I’d been looking for an opportunity to try OutSystems for some time. This project seemed to tick all the boxes for a first project; it wasn’t overly complex, and the need for mobile offline functionality was both a capability of OutSystems and a missing piece in our armory. The fly in the ointment was the pressing deadline; I didn’t think we’d have time to learn OutSystems and deliver this project in the three months available.”

Teamwork Prevents Sour Grapes

Solution - When Tony called OutSystems, he quickly learned that a problem shared could be a problem halved. One of the best ways to get started with OutSystems is through a pilot project, staffed by the customer and the OutSystems professional services team.

A combination of structured training, moment-of-need coaching, and day-to-day collaboration on the project is the surest way to learn OutSystems and immediately put it into practice.

“What we liked about this teamed-up approach was that it disrupted our normal ways of working. OutSystems brought significant agile expertise to the table, not just technical skills. There was a much greater focus on user experience throughout the project, all the way from requirements capture to the weekly demonstrations at the end of each sprint. As we completed development, there were absolutely no surprises, and the training effort seemed minimal because the app worked the way all users needed,” explained O’Halloran.

The shared development approach compressed development to just nine weeks, with another three weeks for final user acceptance testing and training. By the end, Total Produce had its own OutSystems expertise it could apply to future projects.

“It was a win-win from our point of view. OutSystems was the right tool for the job, but without the team approach, we would not have met our deadline, because we were too busy to assign more in-house developers to this project,” explained O’Halloran.

A Low-Code Labor Bears Fruit

Results – The resulting app has been a real hit with drivers, schedulers, and delivery managers because it’s easy to use and more efficient. Here are a few of its capabilities:

Back-office Administration

Integration with ERP system to load daily orders
Route scheduling
Driver route assignment
Internal reporting
Proof of delivery reports for schools/education authorities

Mobile Access for Drivers

Route guidance
Delivery confirmation
On-screen signature capture with photo fallback
Delivery adjustments
Offline availability
Data and signature synchronization when online

Thanks to the success of this first project, Total Produce has expanded their use of low-code with four more projects, covering diverse requirements such as help desk ticketing, time tracking, credit control, and a customer complaint case management system.

“Now that we’ve proven this low-code approach, we’re bringing more developers into the OutSystems team and starting to tackle more strategic projects,” explained O’Halloran.

However, the benefit is not just much faster development, but also significant savings on IT operations time and resources.

The benefits of OutSystems from IT’s perspective:

Faster, visual development
Better support for an agile, user-centric development approach
DevOps “in a box” including code integrity checking, one-click deployment, and performance monitoring
Ease of integration with a wide variety of business systems including bespoke ERP
Ability to design brilliant user experiences with no dependency on designers/CSS experts
Build mobile apps, both hybrid and native, with full offline capabilities, and use of device features like GPS, touchscreen signature, and camera
Future proof enterprise-grade security and performance

Technologies

Outsystems

CIONET Business Circles

Cyber Circle

CIONET’s Cyber Circle: a new three-event programme exclusively focusing on the most urgent, complex, and high-impact challenges in cybersecurity today. Launched in 2026, this initiative brings together CISOs, CIOs, and senior IT executives with a strong interest in cybersecurity for three curated gatherings each year. As part of CIONET’s trusted executive community, the Cyber Circle provides a confidential, peer-driven environment to exchange insights, share real-world experiences, and address evolving cyber threats. Each session is designed to foster strategic dialogue, strengthen resilience, and elevate cybersecurity as a core driver of business value.

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.