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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 9-9-25 Squad Only Physical english

Fixing the Data Foundations ; Making data trustworthy, consistent, and ready for action

As Belgium navigates the complexities of GDPR and various data sovereignty regulations, organizations across multiple industries face both challenges and opportunities in managing their data across borders. The quest for compliance often intersects with the need for business growth, raising questions about the balance between protection and progress. How can companies effectively own and safeguard their data while ensuring compliance without stifling innovation and expansion in a multi-industry landscape?

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Belgium 11-9-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Customer Experience at the Frontline ; Designing digital tools that actually work

You’ve built the portal. Added the chatbot. Rolled out self-service. But your support lines are still ringing. And your frontline teams are still improvising. If you want digital services to feel seamless, not just look polished, this session brings you back to where value is felt: at the frontline.

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Belgium 13-9-25 All Members Physical english

CIONET Cycling Event

Join us for a scenic ride along the route of the Brabantse Pijl!This ride is suitable for all levels of cyclists and doesn’t require advanced technical skills. We’ll start at de Zoete Waters, where parking is available, and head into the charming Brabant region. Along the way, we’ll tackle some of the area’s iconic climbs — including the legendary Moskesstraat, known for its cobbled character and history in pro cycling. Expect a relaxed, friendly atmosphere and beautiful views throughout. Whether you're training, exploring, or just riding for fun, you’re more than welcome to join!

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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September 9, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Talenty w akcji: sekrety pozyskiwania i rozwoju w CIRF

Utrzymanie talentów w organizacji IT ulokowanej na konkurencyjnym rynku pracy to nie lada zadanie. A jeśli do tego mówimy o organizacji z sektora publicznego? O swoich i swojej organizacji doświadczeniach, metodach i programach opowie Anna Wituła z CIRF. Będzie to jak zawsze okazja do dyskusji na temat różnych sposobów na utrzymanie talentów w firmie.

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September 9, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Fixing the Data Foundations ; Making data trustworthy, consistent, and ready for action

As Belgium tackles GDPR and data sovereignty rules, organizations face challenges and opportunities in cross-border data management. Balancing compliance with growth raises key questions: How can companies protect and control their data while staying compliant—without blocking innovation and expansion across industries?

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September 11, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

(Nie)bezpieczny łańcuch dostaw OT: co powinien wiedzieć dział IT

W fabrykach cyberbezpieczeństwo często zależy od podwykonawców – integratorów, dostawców systemów automatyki i firm serwisowych, które mają zaskakująco szeroki dostęp do infrastruktury OT. W tej prezentacji Igor Zbyryt z BZK pokaże, jak z perspektywy końcowego użytkownika i integratora wygląda współpraca z tymi firmami oraz jakie realne ryzyka to niesie – również w kontekście NIS2. Zamiast wyliczać różnice między IT a OT, skupi się na wspólnym mianowniku i tym, co trzeba zmienić w podejściu organizacji, żeby cyber w produkcji zaczęło działać.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

Recent Cases

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Global fashion leader increases revenue with better data

Burberry uses Databricks & Snowplow to create real-time customer profiles (AI-Ready Customer 360) for personalized service. Faster data insights (no more daily batches) improve in-store recommendations and marketing ROI. The platform respects customer privacy with server-side cookies and GDPR compliance.

“A shopper who browses products on Burberry.com is telling us something about what she really wants. Thanks to Databricks and Snowplow, we can build an AI-Ready Customer 360 so our client advisors have that information from the moment she walks into our store — and can deliver a personalized NextGen CX.”

— Benjamin Stephens, Senior Manager, Decision Analytics, Burberry
 
 

Burberry is a global luxury brand with a rich British heritage. The company has 413 stores worldwide and plans to keep growing by providing an outstanding, personalized customer experience. Until recently, this goal was difficult to achieve due to extensive data processing delays which prevented the company from analyzing clickstream data from Burberry.com in a timely fashion. By implementing the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow’s Behavioral Data Platform, Burberry formed a complete view of each customer (AI-Ready Customer 360). In-store client advisors can now pull up information about opted-in customers’ latest online behavior on their phones and tablets — which helps them deliver a truly superior customer experience (NextGen CX).

Daily clickstream data batches arrived too late to be useful

Whether they’re looking for the iconic Burberry trench coat or another luxury clothing item, shoppers around the world flock to Burberry stores for a personalized experience. But many browse the company’s offerings online first, a practice known as webrooming. Burberry analyzes online user behavior to determine how they can best improve their service and increase sales. For years, the company pulled clickstream data from a cloud-based data warehouse — but wanted more precise control over data delivery.

“With our data warehouse, we would receive the previous day’s data anywhere between 2:00 and 7:00 PM GMT,” recalled Benjamin Stephens, Senior Manager, Decision Analytics at Burberry. “Although that delivery schedule works for many businesses, we at Burberry are in a constant race to activate our web data so that we can pass it along to our client advisors in stores, worldwide. That kind of speed is essential to offering the level of service for which Burberry is known.”

Burberry also needed greater visibility into their data. The company’s data warehouse automatically pre-aggregated and sanitized Burberry’s data, which made it difficult to trust the details about customer visits. Burberry also needed to validate their web data regularly to ensure it was actionable.

“The more deeply we dug into our data, the less confident we felt in our ability to form conclusions,” said Stephens. “Simple requests such as, ‘What happened on the website yesterday?’ were going unanswered. We often faced the choice of either making a quick decision or making a good one.”

 

Better, faster data enables machine learning models to drive NextGen CX

To address these challenges, Burberry implemented the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow’s Behavioral Data Platform (BDP). The solutions enable Burberry to deliver a NextGen CX based on reliable, high-quality data. As clickstream data flows in from Burberry.com, the company uses Snowplow BDP to realize real-time AI-Ready Customer 360s from across their digital touchpoints. From there, the data travels into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which contains 40 personalized models covering tasks such as product recommendations, propensity scoring and lifetime value. These models instantly recalculate the data before sending it to the company’s action system.

“A NextGen CX program is only as good as the speed and accuracy of the data you can get from it,” Stephens explained. “With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Snowplow BDP, we’ve broken free from daily data batches and formed an accurate real-time view of our customers’ digital activity. Our personalized models automatically stay up-to-date by consuming behavioral data. And throughout the process, Snowplow helps us safeguard data privacy by giving us total control over how much information we collect from customers and enabling us to track user consent.”

Burberry also gained a more accurate view of their marketing ROI by refining their approach to marketing attribution. The company used Snowplow to refine their business definitions for all their marketing activities and taxonomies. Using the dbt plug-in for Databricks, Burberry gathered additional detail from their referral sources, consent banners and server-side cookies. As a result, the company has migrated onto a rich and fully owned marketing foundation that uses a simple attribution model to understand what’s working in near-time.

“Using behavioral data from Snowplow, we’ve formed a last-click attribution view that incorporates some of the many variables from our work,” Stephens added. “We’ve gotten much smarter about how we create our data lead attribution models, which will help us make better decisions about where to invest our marketing spend in the future.”

 

Driving a NextGen CX with powerful personalization

After implementing Databricks and Snowplow, Burberry has overcome many of their longstanding personalization challenges. Previously, the company faced a severe limitation in using cookies because the Safari browser limits cookie duration to seven days. After switching to server-side cookies with Snowplow, Burberry’s cookies are now valid for 12 months. Best of all, server-side cookies are much better than third-party cookies for respecting customer privacy and adhering to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — top priorities for Burberry.

“Going from one week to one year for our anonymous cookies is a ridiculous uplift,” said Stephens. “When we can hang onto a user for up to a year, there’s a much greater likelihood that they will identify themselves at some point by clicking on an email. That enables us to tie their history back to an actual customer and begin to provide them with more personalized service.”

Burberry’s focus on offering better service to webrooming customers has also paid off. The average webrooming journey lasts two to six hours from the time a Burberry customer begins browsing online to the time they arrive at a Burberry store. With Databricks and Snowplow, Burberry delivers data to their client advisors in time for them to provide knowledgeable service based on the online behavior of opted-in customers.

“Our client advisors can pull out their iPad or iPhone devices to gain an instant view of what a customer really wants and which products to recommend,” Stephens remarked. “That’s crucial to making sales, because if we miss that opportunity, we may have to wait another week or two until the customer returns. There’s no chance we would be able to support this use case if we were still getting our clickstream data in daily batches.”

The synergy between Databricks and Snowplow allows Burberry to consume clickstream data on their own schedule, rather than the schedule of their data provider. “We’re working on getting data latency down to five minutes, which is huge for a business like ours,” Stephens concluded. “Snowplow enabled us to replace multiple data sources and their transformations with a single set of definitions. And we lean on Databricks to combine many different behaviors from different sources and at different cadences. This is the beginning of a whole new age of customer service at Burberry.”

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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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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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.

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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 !

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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.

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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
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Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
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Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
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Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
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Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
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Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
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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
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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
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Koen Vandaele
CIO
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Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
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CIO
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Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
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Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
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Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
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Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
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Dean
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Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
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christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe
bauduin cor
Baudouin Corlùy
Chief Market Development Officer
LCL Data Centers

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!