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Belgium 10-3-26 All Members Physical english

The Composable Enterprise: Engineered with AI

From modular business design to AI-driven pipelines, architectures, and operationsA composable enterprise is built on modular processes, API-driven ecosystems, low-code platforms, and cloud-native services. It promises speed and adaptability by allowing organisations to reconfigure their capabilities as conditions change. However, modular design alone does not guarantee resilience; the way these systems are engineered and operated is just as important.This is where AI is beginning to make a difference. Beyond generating snippets of code, AI is already influencing how entire systems are developed and run: accelerating CI/CD pipelines, improving test coverage, optimising Infrastructure-as-Code, sharpening observability, and even shaping architectural decisions. These changes directly affect how quickly new business components can be deployed, connected, and retired.In this session, we will examine how CIOs can bring these two movements together:Composable design is the framework for flexibility and modularity.AI-augmented engineering is the force that delivers the speed, quality, and intelligence needed to sustain it.The pitfalls of treating them in isolation: composability that collapses under slow engineering cycles, or AI that only adds complexity without a modular structure.The discussion goes beyond concepts to practical implications: how to architect organisations that can be recomposed at speed, without losing control or reliability. The outcome is an enterprise that is not only modular in design but also engineered to adapt continuously under real-world conditions.

Belgium 12-3-26 Physical english

The Third-Party Risk Reckoning: How far can you trust your vendors?

Tomato! Tomato! Tomato! Get your tomato now! Every vendor sells security. And every company depends on vendors, partners, and suppliers. The more digital the business becomes, the longer that list grows, and so does the attack surface. One weak link, and there is always one, or one missed update, and trust collapses faster than any firewall can react. What used to be a procurement checklist has become a full-time discipline. Questionnaires, audits, and endless documentation prove that everyone’s “compliant,” yet incidents keep happening. So it’s clear: the issue isn’t lack of policy, or maybe a bit, but mostly lack of visibility. Beyond a certain point, even the most secure organisation is only as safe as its least prepared partner (or an employee who hadn’t had their morning coffee). So how far can you trust your vendors? How do you check what you can’t control? And when does assurance become theatre instead of protection? Does it come at a different cost? Let’s exchange what works and what fails in third-party risk management: live monitoring, shared responsibility models, contractual levers, and the reality of building trust in a chain you don’t own. A closed conversation for those redefining what partnership means when risk is shared but accountability isn’t.

Belgium 19-3-26 Country Members Physical french

Vendor Detox: La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ?

Moins de Partenaires : La consolidation vaut-elle le risque ? Le problème est la prolifération des fournisseurs : trop d'outils causant de la complexité, une taxe d'intégration paralysante et de la redondance. La Taxe d'Intégration est le coût caché (en temps, en échecs et en ressources) d'essayer de faire fonctionner ensemble des systèmes disparates. Cet échange se concentre sur des stratégies éprouvées pour simplifier de manière agressive le parc technologique, consolider les fournisseurs et élever certains fournisseurs clés au rang de partenaires stratégiques.

March 12, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

The Third-Party Risk Reckoning: How far can you trust your vendors?

March 24, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Killing Zombie Projects: Knowing when to stop, restart, or quietly let go

Every organisation has them, projects that keep running long after their purpose has faded. No one remembers who asked for them, but shutting them down feels riskier than keeping them alive. And eventually, people stay assigned, budgets stay allocated, and energy drains into work that no longer matters. Inertia at its finest.

March 26, 2026 Squad Session Invitation Only Physical english

Measuring Value in AI Initiatives: Defining ROI, accountability, and measurable outcomes in complex environments

AI projects continue to multiply, but proving their value remains difficult. Most organisations can track activity, not impact. Dashboards count pilots and models, yet few translate to measurable business outcomes. The result is familiar: success stories without clarity on what they actually delivered.

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novobanco delivers personalized digital experiences to customers

Portugal's novobanco sought to reinvent banking with personalized, digital customer experiences. The bank decided to migrate to a container- and microservices-based application infrastructure. Microsoft Azure Red Hat® OpenShift®, a jointly managed solution, helped the bank adopt a hybrid environment for new and existing applications.

Portugal’s novobanco sought to reinvent banking with personalized, digital customer
experiences based on open banking practices. To support this strategy, the bank decided to
migrate to a container- and microservices-based application infrastructure. Microsoft Azure
Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly managed solution, helped the bank adopt a hybrid environment for
new and existing applications. Now, using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/
CD) and DevOps approaches, novobanco has increased its digital services adoption, reduced
time to market for applications, and improved partner integration using open banking
application programming interfaces (APIs).

Rethinking physical and digital banking experiences
novobanco operates a vast network of branches and business centers across Portugal,
complemented by its novobanco Linha Direta telephone banking service and digital banking
offering, novobanco Online.
Shortly after American equity firm Lone Star Funds acquired 75% of its capital in 2017, the bank
engaged management consulting firm McKinsey & Company to help define a three-year IT strategy.
“We needed to change the way we developed our offerings to speed time to market,” said Manuel
Domingues, CIO, novobanco. “Achieving that goal meant addressing four key areas of our business
to increase efficiency: our technology, our processes, our organization, and our culture.”
Working with McKinsey, the bank planned a new approach to digital business based on cloud
computing and big data, supported by a microservices-based architecture and DevOps practices.
This new approach would not only help reduce operating costs but also support entry into new digital
markets with open banking application programming interfaces (APIs).
“By changing how we acquire and engage with our customers, across physical and digital channels,
we could meet our larger goal of expanding our customer base,” said Domingues.

Building a managed, secured environment for application development
After searching for a cloud platform, novobanco chose Red Hat OpenShift for its local enterprise
support and multicloud capabilities.
“Red Hat OpenShift was the ideal choice to be able to deliver customer services flawlessly while
switching between hosting containers on-premise and in the cloud,” said Domingues.
The bank worked with Red Hat Consulting to test several use cases, including running a microservice
in Red Hat OpenShift using the Spring Boot Java™ framework, a DevOps pipeline for automating
development processes, and a proof of concept (POC) demonstrating digital channel interactions.
Next, the bank deployed Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift in production and began migrating
its applications—as microservices—to this on-premise environment, jointly managed by Red Hat
and Microsoft. Red Hat’s single sign-on (SSO) technology helps secure novobanco’s microservices,
integrating with the bank’s existing Azure Active Directory servers to validate user credentials and
extract identity information.
The bank now uses its container environment—as well as React.js, an open source JavaScript user
interface library—to design and deploy low-code front-end applications, such as its smartphone app.

Focusing on innovation for customers and partners

Reduced time to market for digital services
With a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach supported by DevOps
processes and automation, novobanco can deliver new, personalized services to its customers
faster. For example, the bank recently developed new push notifications for transaction validation
that improve security and reduce messaging costs for customers. Additionally, using Red Hat and
Microsoft’s cost-effective, jointly managed service also helps novobanco stay productive by
mitigating time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks

The bank is already seeing positive outcomes from spending less time on routine delivery processes
and more time on innovation, including 20% year over year (YOY) growth in mobile interactions and
a 7% YOY increase in the number of active digital customers. As the result of a 165% YOY increase
across most of its portfolio, digital now makes up more than 1/3 of the bank’s total product sales.
As part of this approach, the bank is developing frameworks for various needs—such as simulations or
integration—with defined patterns that can be reused by more than one development team

Improved responsiveness with scalable, supported hybrid infrastructure
With plans to design all new applications to be cloud-native, novobanco can use its vendor-agnostic
Red Hat OpenShift container environment to prevent lock-in to specific cloud providers. The flexibility to move workloads between clouds will help the bank cost-effectively scale to meet demand.
Additionally, developers no longer need to build applications to run in specific environments, improving productivity and supporting DevOps collaboration.
“With Red Hat OpenShift, we can move workloads between on-premise and off-premise environments without needing to change any code,” said Domingues. “Some applications will remain on
premise for now, such as those with specific regulatory requirements, any that might be affected by
latency, or any that have not yet been optimized for microservices or the cloud. When we’re ready, we
have the flexibility to move them to Azure Red Hat OpenShift without any service interruptions or
outages.”

Improved support for integration with third-party partners
Supporting its open banking API approach with a scalable, secure integration process will help novobanco enter new digital banking markets by partnering with other financial services organizations.
“Running containers and microservices on Red Hat OpenShift allows us to support open banking APIs
as well as integrations with SaaS or PaaS technology solutions from partners,” said Domingues.

Enhanced technology adoption with expert support and guidance
Engaging Red Hat Consulting and participating in Red Hat Training on Red Hat OpenShift helped the
bank’s teams quickly gain the necessary skills to support its digital strategy. In addition to support
during the POC stage, Red Hat consultants helped stabilize the bank’s OpenShift cluster in production, set up a cluster for testing configuration changes, and manage platform implementation and
upgrades. For example, the bank continues to work with Red Hat for infrastructure, development,
and application architecture optimization.
“Red Hat Consulting helped us take advantage of best practices so that we could focus on developing solutions and integrations that meet our business needs and delivering new features to market
faster,” said Domingues.

Enhancing hybrid approach to continue digital services journey
novobanco plans to continue using Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for both legacy and new
applications, with a goal to shift up to half of its modernized applications to run in a multicloud environment. The bank is also looking to adopt Red Hat Runtimes, a set of lightweight runtimes and
frameworks that are ideal for highly distributed microservices architectures.
“Hybrid infrastructure and DevOps are changing the way we develop our services and applications,
and Red Hat OpenShift is an essential part of our journey to digital delivery,” said Domingues. “As we
evolve, we expect to achieve further scalability and reliability, among other benefits.”

About novobanco
novobanco is a reference in the Portuguese financial system, recognized by its high standards
of service quality and commercial dynamics with which its clients, individuals, companies, and
institutions are served. It addresses a broad range of clients’ financial needs, acting in a transversal
way in all areas of financial services, such as retail and corporate banking, asset management, and
insurance. https://www.novobanco.pt/

Technologies

Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift®

Partners

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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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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.