Belgium 23-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english
Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.
Read MoreBelgium 23-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the financial services industry in Belgium faces a critical juncture regarding its cloud adoption strategy. While the allure of cloud computing – with its promise of scalability, agility, and innovation – is undeniable, the unique regulatory demands and paramount need for data sovereignty present significant challenges. This CIONET roundtable, aims to bring together Digital Leaders from the Belgian financial sector to discuss how to navigate these complexities. We will explore how financial institutions can leverage cloud technologies while ensuring complete control over their data, maintaining compliance with stringent European regulations like GDPR and DORA, and mitigating geopolitical risks.
Read MoreBelgium 24-9-25 Invitation Only Physical english
As smart devices proliferate across operational environments — from sensors on factory lines and GPS trackers in logistics fleets to wearables in healthcare and connected systems in smart cities — the integration of Managed IoT (MiOT) is accelerating. But with it comes a surge in cybersecurity risks. No longer isolated or air-gapped, OT systems are becoming fully networked, remotely accessible, and deeply entwined with IT. This creates a vulnerable, highly complex digital mesh, one where a single compromised device can trigger physical, financial, and reputational consequences.
Read MoreSeptember 23, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Security teams are overwhelmed. Too many tools. Too many alerts. Too few people. And now, increasing pressure from the board to protect everything, everywhere, all the time. Expect honest reflection, shared strategies, and a conversation that cuts through compliance noise and focuses on what to do when your team is stretched and your risk is rising.
Read MoreSeptember 30, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Everyone has technical debt. The question is what to do with it. Refactor now? Wait for the next feature? Build on it and hope it holds? If you’re tired of debating whether to clean up or move on, this session helps you frame the debt conversation in a way that supports both speed and stability.
Read MoreOctober 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english
Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.
Read MoreDC Water hunts lost water with analytics
Predictive analytics and AI are helping the District of Columbia’s water authority discover water main and sewer pipe breaks proactively.
The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) delivers about 900 million gallons of drinking water a day via 1,300 miles of pipes, and operates the worlds largest advanced wastewater treatment plant, processing an average of about 300 million gallons a day. Thomas Kuczynski’s mission is to deliver analytics throughout the organization, or, as he puts it, to get out of the report business.
“I want to be in the data business,” Kuczynski says. “I want to be here exposing a reliable, auditable source of information to the people that need to make the decisions.”
Kuczynski is CIO and vice president of IT at DC Water and president of DC Water’s wholly owned nonprofit affiliate, Blue Drop, which is responsible for generating non-ratepayer revenue to help minimize the impact of rate increases on DC Water customers.
“We’ve made a significant investment in certain areas, largely focused on what we refer to as ‘non-revenue water,’” Kuczynski says. “We’re spending a lot of time on the operations side building predictive analytics tools for predicting water main breaks so we can be more proactive in eliminating them rather than responding to them. We’re doing some work now in what is typically referred to in the electric industry as ‘outage management.’”
Much of the focus of DC Water’s efforts is on eliminating “unaccounted for water,” which is the difference between the water pumped into the system, and the water consumed, measured by an advanced meter reading (AMR) system. Some of that unaccounted for water is the result of legitimate uses, such as the city’s fire suppression efforts via DC Water’s more than 9,000 fire hydrants.
“As you eliminate all those, there’s a remainder of water that’s being consumed by the system somehow, but it’s not being billed,” Kuczynski says. “It could be because of inaccurate metering — oversized meters that run slow because there’s not enough volume, meters that are degrading and have to be recalibrated.”
So Kuczynski and his team are putting a variety of data sources to work in building a set of dashboards and routines to isolate where the majority of that loss is occurring and “home in on specific areas where the overall loss is significantly higher than in other portions of the system, and then apply other types of analytics to try to determine why,” he says.
Analytics in action
Kuczynski’s team is building digital platforms and linking them to DC Water’s SCADA and process control system (PCS). SCADA manages and controls DC Water’s distribution and collection system, while PCS operates the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. By integrating those systems with its customer systems and GIS platform, DC Water is able to perform spatial analysis as events are occurring.
“When heavy rain falls, we’re able to monitor the performance of the collection systems and also potential customer complaints about flooding to be more proactive about responding to those on the water delivery side,” Kuczynski says.
The analytics also enables DC Water to compare the consumption of similar users (such as hotels or laundromats) to look for outliers. Doing so helps the organization identify potential leaks or bad meters. It’s even helped the organization discover broken pipes in abandoned properties.
The most sophisticated analytical tool DC Water has is Pipe Sleuth, a sewer assessment solution developed at Blue Drop that uses AI to review CCTV footage to assess sewer pipe status in real time.
“It uses an advanced, deep learning neural network model to do image analysis of small diameter sewer pipes, classify them, and then create a condition assessment report,” Kuczynski says.
Prior to Pipe Sleuth, operators had to review each frame of footage manually and tag any defects they saw. A certified engineer would then look at the tagged footage and classify the defects.
Kuczynski, who has been DC Water’s CIO since 2013, says the organization started implementing analytics in a comprehensive and focused way about two years ago.
“Some of that ramp up was educating people around digital analytics and data science, creating and exposing the digital assets that we had available to us,” he says. “Largely it was focused on individual systems first, like understanding how well individual groups of workers were performing particular types of jobs relative to the population as a whole.”
Those efforts were fairly straightforward but helped the team gain experience. About a year ago, they started aggregating different sources of information, such as bringing together billing data and meter data from the AMR system and blending it.
“We’re getting more and more sophisticated,” Kuczynski says.
A matter of trust
The initial education component at DC Water consisted of centralizing data sources, providing access to them, and helping individuals understand how those resources could aid decision-making processes.
“Part of it is really educating people about the power of some of these tools and their ability to be more precise in their predictions, and getting people comfortable, especially when the answer comes out and you don’t necessarily always see the process through which that happens,” Kuczynski says.
Helping others gain trust in predictive analytics tools is essential, and it may mean working through the answer a model provided to either confirm it or cancel it out. Kuczynski points to the tool for predicting water main breaks. It’s accepted wisdom in a lot of circles that water main breaks occur due to cold weather, and they are more frequent in colder parts of the year. That said, the tool also has to predict water main breaks during warm parts of the year.
“If your goal is to solve the main break problem, then you have to solve it in its entirety, not just for that one part of the year,” he says. “It’s actually more about rapid fluctuations in temperature that cause the ground to surge and cause dislocations in a pipe.”
Ultimately, the goal of all these efforts is to drive down water loss between 2% and 5%, roughly 1.8 million to 4.5 million gallons per day. Every 1% of “found water” that was previously unmetered is worth about $4 million to the organization.
“You want to look at those problems that are persistent challenges for your organization and ideally have a revenue component or efficiency component associated with them,” Kuczynski says. “It’s always easier to sell something that saves you something, whether that’s real dollars or something that improves a process significantly.”
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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?
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreDécouvrez 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 !
Read MoreCIONET 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.
Read MoreWould you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!
You can either send us a registered handwritten letter explaining why you'd like to become a member or you can simply talk to us right here!