As we are building the CIONET Belgium conference program for 2018, we surveyed our Belgian members on which areas of their future activities keep them awake at night. For each of the 12 themes selected by our Advisory Board, we asked the respondents to score how interesting they are for them, as well as how vital they are to their business. The difference shows what CIOs want to know, versus what they need to know.

With around 60% of the respondent stating that it is both interesting and vital for their business, data management is clearly on top of the agenda of the majority of CIOs. This goes far beyond GDPR, as themes such as data governance, dark analytics and machine learning have scored very highly within this field.

The challenge of building the right IT architecture scores highly, both as interesting and vital for CIOs. Building the right architecture to integrate different apps, dealing with the complexity of legacy versus new architecture and, to a lesser extent, microservices, these challenges clearly keep the CIOs awake at night.

Interestingly, ‘building a user-centric IT organisation’ scores relatively low when asked how interesting it is for CIOs, but highly when asked how vital it is for their business, where it reaches the second place. This might be an indication of the fact that, though CIOs see the importance of the objective, they have a clear understanding of how to reach it. The challenge might be less poignant. The same accounts for ‘the future of work’, which includes the adoption of crowdsourcing and open innovation, of which 23% of the respondents say it is interesting, but 32% say it is critical for their business.

New business models, among which companies as a platform, scores highly as well both in terms of interesting and vital to the businesses of CIOs.

Strikingly, disruptive technologies such as 3D printing and robotics, as well as Blockchain technology, are not at the top of the agenda of CIOs. With regard of Blockchain, 23% of the respondents even state that it is of very low relevance to their business.

Stay tuned as we are finalising the program of CIONET Belgium for 2018, bringing you the most insightful and relevant content to realize your ambitions!