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Belgium 27-8-26 AB Members Physical english

Summer Festival: Advisory Board

CIO agendas are crowded: cost pressure, cyber, regulation, talent, data, AI, vendor dependency, business expectations. Most organisations are trying to do too much at once, and the “must-do” work often blocks the strategic work. CIONET only creates value if its agenda matches what CIOs truly need, in the right format, at the right time. The challenge Pick the few priorities that matter most for 2027, then translate them into a clear CIONET agenda. Outcome we leave with A ranked CIO agenda for 2027, and a directly aligned CIONET programme outline (themes, formats, cadence), with a shortlist of speaker and case targets.

Belgium 27-8-26 Country Members Physical english

Summerfest: From Story to Habit

How to align people, shift routines, and prove value Technology transformations often fail not because the tools don’t work, but because people don’t change their work habits. Boards want proof of value, executives want business outcomes, IT wants clarity, and employees want ease. Between these expectations, the CIO’s role is no longer just to deliver platforms; it is to tell the story that motivates people and turn that story into daily habits. This session will explore: The narrative: how to craft a simple, repeatable story that explains the “why” behind change for every stakeholder. From story to routine: practical ways to embed new behaviours through manager rituals, team incentives, and visible leadership. Reskilling and new expectations: preparing teams for evolving roles, from cross-department collaboration to AI-enhanced workflows. Measuring what matters: showing progress in speed, quality, and resilience — not just in licences bought or trainings completed. The aim is to equip CIOs with a leadership toolkit: a story that unites, habits that endure, and proof that convinces even the toughest boardroom.

Belgium 8-9-26 Invitation Only Virtual english

What an AI Architect Actually Does in Practice; Skills, responsibilities, interfaces, and career moves behind one of the most misunderstood emerging roles.

The AI architect role is becoming more visible, and the scope varies across organisations. The challenge is defining what the role owns, where it sits, and how it works with existing architecture, data, security, risk, and business teams. Three pressure points need clarity. - Role definition matters because the position can span solution architecture, data architecture, governance, integration, security, vendor selection, and business process design. - Interfaces matter because the role must connect teams while respecting existing responsibilities. - Skills matter because technical depth needs to be combined with judgement around controls, delivery choices, and operational boundaries. The working question is simple: how do we define the AI architect role so it becomes useful, credible, and connected to delivery? If this role is emerging in your organisation, let’s compare how others are defining it and where they are placing it.

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Adoption success. New voice solution for a media company

Moving to a unified communications platform to accelerate digital transformation and boost productivity.

Overview
Technology is changing the world as we know it.
It’s a huge challenge for organisations looking to accelerate their digital transformation. Including one of our longstanding customers, a mass media company who needed to move to a unified communications platform to help their teams work smarter and improve customer and user experience. But when you’re a global organisation with 30,000 staff across 170 locations in 84 countries, it’s not so straightforward.

The challenge
Changing user behaviour
The rise in remote working meant a number of their employees were using their own phones, laptops and unsupported collaboration apps. Lack of visibility and control of BYOD not only posed a real risk to their network, but also user experience.

Having everyone use a single solution across chat, phone and meetings would not only simplify end user experience but improve collaboration, increase productivity, and strengthen security. But due to their size, this wouldn’t be an easy task.

It wasn’t just about rolling out a new communications platform across the organisation but changing its culture too. The customer needed to educate its people before, after and during the migration to ensure they fully embraced the new technology and got the most out of it.

And that’s where our user adoption service came in.

In addition to adding great business value, the BT user adoption team worked as collaborative partners and were a true pleasure to work with.”

Chief People Officer

The solution
User adoption made simple
The customer was using multiple collaboration tools – this wasn’t cost-effective or scalable. Migrating to Microsoft Teams Direct Routing would give them a workspace for real-time collaboration, communication and meetings, all in one place. Along with a choice of calling plans over our global SIP network allowing them to make and receive calls within the platform.

Our proven methodology has helped organisations achieve faster business results and ongoing value from their cloud technology investment. So, we were best placed to deliver a user adoption programme to support the upgrade of 27,000 users to the new cloud-based platform.

A big part of our user adoption service is taking the time to understand our customers’ business challenges. Our dedicated specialist spent time with them to understand their users’ current behaviour and identify the change required.

The plan was to deliver an “early adopter” programme to 420 employees. The customer would then take the learnings from the programme to further improve the overall roll out of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing to its wider organisation.

To support the early adopters through the change and drive engagement, we created a detailed launch communication plan, including training and assets, and personalised email communications inviting them to attend tailored online training sessions. We also launched a user content library for online video tutorials, quick start guides and FAQs. We created additional help and advice for hearing impaired users, guiding them through the platform's accessibility features, like live captions. Users were asked to complete a small survey four weeks after the early adopter launch, to provide valuable insight to help improve the wider roll out.

In addition to our comprehensive early adoption programme, we also set up our Genius Desk, a ‘go to’ specialist team who became a part of the customer’s organisation for six months. The team offered users specific help and support on each phase of the Teams migration to drive maximum adoption.

The result
A better user experience
We successfully helped the customer change user behaviour and get everyone on board. The early adopters programme achieved 100% take-up as a result of our detailed launch plan - avoiding any disruption to business activity.

Our user adoption team received high praise from the customer, calling out their amazing support for what was “a very complex series of inter-related projects” and how they were a “true pleasure to work with”.

Users also got a lot from our training, with one saying: “It was fast paced, insightful, and will help me be more efficient day-to-day.”

Six months since the roll out of Teams the customer has seen call volumes increase 15 times over.

The training was fast paced, insightful, and will help me be more efficient day-to-day.”

Early adoption programme user

Technologies

Microsoft Teams

Partners

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