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Belgium 01-10-2026 Squad Only Virtual english
Low-code, no-code, and AI tools are giving business teams more ability to build solutions themselves. The challenge is setting the right boundaries before fast local solutions become important operational assets. Three pressure points need attention. - Boundaries must be clear: teams need to know what they can build alone and what requires IT, security, or architecture review. - Supportability matters when a quick solution becomes business-critical. - Risk control remains necessary around data access, compliance, security, process dependency, and maintenance. The working question is simple: how do we enable business-led development while keeping security, ownership, and support under control? If you are trying to enable this safely, let’s compare approaches with others facing the same balance.
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Belgium 06-10-2026 All Members Physical english
As enterprise AI transitions from experimental Proofs of Concept (POCs) into real implementations, digital leaders are encountering a shared challenge: consumption-based public cloud token billing models do not fit neatly into traditional IT budgeting. Daily token consumption can rise unexpectedly, pushing expenses through the roof while arbitrary caps quickly kill momentum for innovation. For many CIOs, this raises an open strategic question: How do we keep costs under control while further stimulating innovation? During this interactive CIONET roundtable, we will explore among peers how to navigate AI tokenomics. Rather than treating public cloud LLMs as the default path, we will investigate how different execution environments, ranging from hybrid cloud setups and targeted on-premise models to specialised edge hardware, can help balance cost with performance. This session is intentionally designed as an open peer-to-peer exchange; a space to compare notes, challenge current ways of working and architectural setups, and discuss practical approaches to building predictable, scalable AI models.
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Belgium 08-10-2026 All Members Physical english
Every large organisation has been through a major transformation, and most through several. The word transformation is misleading because it suggests a beginning and an end. But organisations that do well are the ones that have given up on the idea of arriving and realise that constant change has become the new norm, and missing a single cycle leaves you permanently behind. This evening, two leaders will share how they think about this, coming from opposite directions. John Porter led Telenet through a sustained period of reinvention spanning the pandemic, a full reorganisation into tribes, M&A, and a shift to a performance driven culture. Along the way, the IT department was dissolved and technology was embedded inside autonomous tribes that run as small businesses. There is no CIO at Telenet. It is Telenet Group’s purpose to become a digital-first, customer-centric organisation. To deliver on this ambition, it has embarked on a transformation journey built on three pillars: (i) the implementation of a scaled-agile operating model (organisation), (ii) the acceleration of digitisation and automation underpinned by optimised IT systems, platforms, and strategic technology partnerships (digitisation), and (iii) a performance leadership culture focused on accountability, ownership, and a change mindset (culture). Kris Vervaet, on the other hand, has just become CIO at KBC, the bank whose mobile app has been ranked best in the world three times and whose AI assistant Kate now handles 70% of customer queries on its own. But Kris is no ordinary CIO: he ran DPG Media Belgium as CEO, and KBC went looking for someone who has led transformation rather than someone who manages technology. So while one organisation got rid of the CIO role, the other reinvented it, and both are thriving. The conversation will range across organisational and IT redesign, the rise of digital-first customer experience, the impact of AI on how every business is run, and the harder questions of culture, talent and leadership. The question for every leader in the room is what that tells you about your own role, your own operating model, and the pace at which you are prepared to keep evolving.
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CIONET Trailblazer: CISO: The Shift from Prevention to Resilience: Turning Visibility into Execution
Published on: January 28, 2026 @ 9:48 AM
CIONET Trailblazer: AI Transformation: Bridging the Cultural Divide to Achieve Competitive Advantage
Published on: December 17, 2025 @ 9:16 AM
Adoption success. New meetings solution for an insurance company
A new cloud-based meetings solution is delivering a great user experience and enhancing collaboration.
Overview
Transforming user behaviour to make new technology a success
To accelerate its digital transformation, one of our largest customers – a global insurance company – needed to embrace hybrid cloud technologies. This would enable them to deliver a greater experience to their users and customers, enhance collaboration and improve operational efficiency. The key was to ensure that everyone across the organisation was on board to fully embrace the new technology. But in order to do that they needed to transform user behaviour and change the company culture, which is not an easy task.
The challenge
Technology is changing fast. But it’s important to recognise that digital transformation isn’t just about the tech, it’s about people. Being a global organisation with 55,000 staff around the world, the customer recognised that in order to support their digital transformation they needed to move away from their existing single audio and web conferencing service to a new, scalable and cost-effective unified communications platform. The latest Webex Meetings solution would give their employees and customers a better, more consistent meeting experience. The challenge was to educate 12,000 users before, after and during the migration to ensure the roll out was a success. And that’s where our user adoption service came in.
The BT team were extremely collaborative working alongside our internal change management team to ensure the end user experience is fully considered and managed through a significant enterprise-wide change.”
Head of Release Management
The solution
A tried and tested process to improve user adoption
A big part of our user adoption service is taking the time to understand our customers’ business challenges. We believe this isn’t the responsibility of just one person. That’s why we have a dedicated user adoption team with experience in helping organisations achieve faster business results and ongoing value from their cloud technology investment.
The customer’s dedicated user adoption specialist worked alongside their internal change management team, to understand their user’s current behaviour and identify the change required. This helped us to identify the best engagement approach and ensure the end user experience was fully considered and managed across the whole organisation.
Without a user adoption strategy employees often waste time trying to find training support and calling helpdesks. So as part of the plan, we created a series of generic and targeted awareness email campaigns informing users that the customer was upgrading their comms tools as part of their drive to improve user experience and align regional teams to the organisation’s global strategy. Welcome emails were also sent out with information on how to get started with the new service, including reminders to close their old legacy service accounts. We also produced a number of articles about the benefits of Webex Meetings, which were posted to the customer’s internal communication channels.
We know users are eager to learn new skills with their collaboration and communication tools. That’s why we built self-learning training into the customer’s user adoption plan, creating a web portal with bespoke user guides, best practice and FAQs that users could refer to at their leisure, or whenever they needed support. We also delivered informal, personal high touch one-to-one coaching and onsite training. In total, we provided 59 scheduled training sessions that were recorded and uploaded to the self-serve learning portal for users ongoing development. The customer also wanted language support as part of their service, so we translated the training sessions into Spanish for employees at the company’s new HQ in Madrid.
Throughout the programme we had regular project reviews with the customer and provided bespoke daily reports of the old and new service, to monitor success and develop next step recommendations in real-time.
The result
Global change
We successfully helped the customer change user behaviour and get everyone on board, including the different business units and country leads.
We smoothly migrated 12,000 employees to Cisco’s single Webex Meetings platform, without any business disruption while educating and informing each individual user on how to get started and make the most out of the new service through tailored content and assets.
The programme achieved the company’s goal – 67% user adoption and 3,000 new users registered within the first month of launch.
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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.
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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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