<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2528533714139722&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
New call-to-action
be-page-banner (1)

Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

See what's next

Upcoming Events

 
Banner

Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

Read More
Banner

Belgium 28-8-25 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership. Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.

Read More
Banner

Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

Read More

Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
Banner

August 5, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

AI Act – praktyka stosowania na rynku polskim

AI Act – dyrektywa unijna regulująca wiele zasad wykorzystania AI w modelach biznesowych- już obowiązuje na polskim rynki. Ciekawe są prawdziwe i realne przypadki jej stosowania. Spójrzmy na temat od strony regulacyjnej, czyli prawnej. Ale zobaczmy praktykę aktywnej w temacie kancelarii prawnej. Zaprosiliśmy mecenaskę Aleksandrę Maciejewicz z kancelarii Lawmore, która od dłuższego czasu jest niezwykle aktywna i praktykuje w tym temacie. Poznamy podstawę prawną, praktyczne case’y i opis sytuacji oczami prawdziwego praktyka.

Read More
Banner

August 6, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

DORA: wszystko, co chcielibyście wiedzieć, a baliście się zapytać

Michał Kulesza, adwokat, partner w departamencie technologicznym kancelarii Rymarz Zdort Maruta i szef zespołu regulacji ICT, przeprowadzi nas przez kluczowe wątki rozporządzenia i zmierzy się z pytaniami zgłoszonymi przez uczestników. Omówimy zarówno krytyczne aspekty na początku wdrożeń, jak i dostrajanie zmian na poziomie organizacyjnym i strategicznym. Masz konkretny temat, który warto poruszyć? Zgłoś go w trakcie rejestracji. Zamiast czytać między wierszami DORA – porozmawiajmy o tym wprost.

Read More
Banner

August 7, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Automated Systems Testing

Duże tempo developmentu i dokonywanych zmian wymaga nowej klasy testowania. Jakość systemów obserwowana na produkcji będzie pochodną skuteczności tego procesu. Duże nadzieje wiążemy z platformami wspierającymi testowanie i opartymi na AI. Sesja ta pokaże, gdzie jesteśmy w poszukiwaniu takich rozwiązań i gdzie ewaluuje myślenie szefów testów i ich rozwiązania organizacyjne.

Read More

CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

DC 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.”

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

Banner
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?

Read More
Banner
Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The 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 More
Banner
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 !

Read More
Banner
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.

Read More

Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
1658251930890
Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
Untitled design-7
Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
Kevin_Ledegen
Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
Untitled design-Sep-18-2023-11-59-29-7866-AM
Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
Untitled design (4)-Jun-12-2023-01-23-11-7540-PM
Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
CEO
Inès De Bien
Inès De Bien
Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
Hendrik Deckers
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
Untitled design (5)-Sep-01-2022-02-47-55-60-PM
Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET Belgium, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!