Paul Danneels, CIO of VDAB

It is a great pleasure to announce that Paul Danneels, CIO of the Flemish public employment agency VDAB has accepted to become the new chairman of CIONET Belgium's Advisory Board.

To many veterans in the ICT business, Paul Danneels is guaranteed a place in the history books as one of the very first government CIO’s to make use of Google public cloud applications (Google Apps) in his organisation. But this wasn’t the first major project he accomplished. Most of his career was spend in the vendor world, at IBM and CSC amongst others. That’s a major asset, he claims, as “if you know each other’s motives, you’ll have a smoother relationship.”

In 2015 Paul Danneels was elected European CIO of the Year in Public Sector by the CIONET community.

As chairman of CIONET's Advisory Board, Paul will focus on how IT departments play a significant role in the age of digital transformation. He wants the CIONET community to be even more instrumental in dealing with CIO challenges, such as:

• helping business departments build their own applications in a self service
• examining and leveraging the possibilities of new technology opportunities
• understanding how to embed these fast and agile in the whole organisation
• defining and building the required competences for the future

Paul wants CIONET to "build a strong program around these topics not only with seminars but also through peer discussion groups and with inputs from international best practices".

Our big thanks goes to the former chairwoman of the Advisory Board, Sabine Everaet, CIO of Coca Cola Company EMEA, who's done a tremendous job in guiding CIONET Belgium and International into the next steps in becoming the leading professional community for CIO's.