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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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Product-based IT fuels Lufthansa’s digital CX transformation

The German airline is putting control in the hands of its customers and data in the hands of its employees — all part of a digital transformation pivot to product-based IT, CIO Thomas Rückert says.

Like many airlines, Lufthansa Group had its business upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. By April 2020, with travel bans proliferating, the airline suffered losses of €1 million per hour.

Thomas Rückert, senior vice president and CIO of Lufthansa Group, says those early days of the pandemic laid bare that the airline’s digital solutions were not scalable.

“The customers all had to go through flight disruptions, all had to go through service centers, which you couldn’t scale up in line with the need fast enough, so it made it very visible and tangible that self-service solutions are an absolute must improvement for the call centers,” Rückert says.

Lufthansa’s customer experience (CX) strategy has three pillars, Rückert says: physical, service, and digital. Because Lufthansa’s business is moving people from place to place, the physical side of the customer experience is still the airline’s primary pillar. The company also prides itself on providing the best “service touch” it can to its customers.

“You have the service touch that comes from employees, which is probably the thing that we still get the most positive feedback on,” he says.

The digital component of Lufthansa’s customer experience efforts has become increasingly important in supporting the first two pillars.

“How much can you control your journey through the digital space? That’s something that we lacked in the past and we don’t want to in the future,” Rückert says. “Also, how do we enable our people in the service, in the cockpit, and in the cabin or on the ground to provide a better service to the people? We strongly believe and focus a lot on how we can give better data to cabin crews so they can, for instance, welcome you.”

Standardizing platforms, shifting to product-based IT

The pandemic accelerated a general trend in the airline industry toward digital transformation, Rückert says, as it was already clear the public wanted more control of their travel experiences through their mobile devices. “That is a trend that started much before the crisis, but it has accelerated significantly,” he says.

At the same time, airport and air traffic control staff are much reduced from pre-pandemic levels, which has put additional pressures on the travel experience that are sometimes outside an airline’s control. That, in turn, leads to more disruptions and more need to rebook travelers on flights — a volume issue for airlines, and one that many travelers want to handle by themselves, Rückert says. “Self-service is now much more important.”

Getting there has been easier said than done for Lufthansa, which was among the first airlines to build a data warehouse for its customer data, but much of that technology is now decades old.

“We had a few tough nuts to crack because our backend technology is quite complex, so finding a way to turn that into a modernized platform detached from the back end is really a difficult problem,” Rückert says. “But it’s much easier than solving the other end of the problem, which is to get the business to let go of decision power a little bit. If you don’t give that to the developers together with some business product owners, you don’t get speed.”

Rückert took the reins as CIO in January 2021, promoted internally from vice president of Base Maintenance Services at Lufthansa Technik, where he helped overhaul the subsidiary’s worldwide overhaul network. When Rückert stepped into the role following the departure of predecessor Roland Schütz, Lufthansa was already a year into a digital transformation journey, one that started with an effort to standardize its various platforms.

“The benefits of those investments are slowly coming to the surface now that the platform is becoming more harmonized,” Rückert says. “So if we make an improvement, we don’t have to do it five times anymore with seven interfaces, all different.”

But Lufthansa’s real transformation started about a year ago, as the IT function started moving away from the traditional project mindset and adopted a product focus, Rückert says.

“We’re moving from a project approach where maybe our board was still thinking the app will be finished one day, where now we’re setting up the pipeline where new features will come down to improve the ones we have,” he says.

His team has already found success in harmonizing and standardizing the web portal, the booking engine, and the app, says Rückert, noting that the team has just started a large-scale alpha test for the latest app versions.

“In the back end, we’ve made a lot of changes to enable better customer data connection with travel ID,” he says. “Those two elements together are the focus of what lies now ahead, connecting those two in a smart way, meaning making good recommendations to the customers. Offering through the profile real advantages, like data only in one place, a simplified process to check in. It looks completely different compared to what you had to do in the past. Safe services is a huge focus topic.”

Benchmarking success

One of the tools Lufthansa has turned to, with the help of partner Boston Consulting Group (BCG), is BCG’s Digital Acceleration Index (DAI), a survey of companies across 10 industries that seeks to benchmark digital transformation and identify how the most digitally mature companies have achieved success.

“We did one big exercise to evaluate ourselves about one and a half years ago,” Rückert says. “Since then, we’ve been doing smaller steps.”

This year, Rückert plans to do another exercise to determine how the company stands in terms of platform automation and the use of data and AI.

To his peers, Rückert says, “don’t underestimate how difficult business transformation is. For us, it started as an IT transformation, platform harmonization, but that’s the easy part. The difficult part is the business transformation, because if that doesn’t happen, you don’t get faster and you have a Ferrari but you can only drive 30 kilometers an hour. I spend a lot of time on that part and I still am. You just have to anticipate that.”

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