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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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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

Partners

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.