On Wednesday 10/11/2021 CIONET brought together digital leaders from all around the world to the 8th edition of CIONEXT. During this special edition of the conference held on zoom platform, Hendrik Deckers talked with the finalists of the European Digital Leader of the Year 2021 in the B2B & B2C categories:

Finalists of the B2B category:

Cindy Hoots | CDO & CIO, AstraZeneca

Thomas Mannmeusel  | Group CIO, Webasto

Javier Cabrerizo | COO, Prosegur

Nik Puri | Senior VP IT, FedEx Express

Finalists of the B2C category:

Marina Bellini | CIO, BAT

Barbara Poli | CIO & CTO, GNV

Sebastian Grams | CIO, Seat & Cupra

Koen Vermeulen | Group CIO, Orange

Patryk Dolewa | CIO, Gemini Polska

We also had a special guest, Antonio Gulli, Engineer Director, Office of CTO at Google Cloud who shared with us three aspects of data and how we can all create value through new levels of data insights.

During the panel discussion with the Finalist we got insights into their latest achievements and we discussed sustainability. We also announced winners. Read till the end to find out who won in the B2B and B2C categories!

The biggest achievements & challenges

Cindy Hoots pointed to the fact that AstraZeneca became a household name due to the vaccine roll-out. In the last 18 months this pharmaceutical delivered 1.7 billion doses at no profit. This amazing ethics of the company is highly motivational for all the employees who see that they have real impact on solving worldwide crisis. AstraZeneca continues its mission, currently by focusing on rare diseases and ultra-rare diseases that affect, respectively, 400 million and 200 000 people.

“What's been really exciting is to see the role that technology is playing in really helping people live better lives have better outcomes in terms of their health and the impact that then has on their families and the communities in which they live, and so you know getting to see the role of AI” (Cindy Hoots)

Thomas Mannmeusel is particularly proud on how his company faced the Corona crisis. One of the last surveys conducted within the Webasto showed that 87% of its employees feel supported and safe. What an impressive number given the fact that the organization has over 16 000 employees! On business level, the biggest achievement is having launched the first two plants to build batteries: one in Germany and one in Korea. What is more, Thomas and his team worked really hard on a common technology stack standardizing the processes and infrastructure. “You do not really see results, it's a lot of work where you don't see anything (…) but now I think, finally the time has come to harvest some of this”, Thomas said with wide smile on his face.

Thomas summarized in a very explicit way what we at CIONET have heard from many Digital Leaders: “Break the silos!” and what is more he chose this phrase as his personal mantra. 

„What is really at my heart is not so much what we create, because this is this is done in many companies but really how it's being done. (…) I don't like these terms anymore: IT and the business.  We have to tear down this wall, we should not integrate applications, but we should integrate organizations.” (Thomas Mannmeusel)

Javier Cabrerizo shared with us his experience of bringing a traditional security company to a completely new level of IT and Digital. “Transform the way we operate” has become his motto. By dividing the work into operating and innovation model, Javier could focus on fixing how the company is run (Operations) and growing it (Innovation). As a result, Prosegur completely redefined its operating model. IT’s enormous contribution was, among others, bringing metrics such as e.g. economic impact and working capital.    

„What we're doing is combining our business know how and the technology skill that we are developing and acquiring so that we can provide better service to your customer” (Javier Cabrerizo)

For Nik Puri the biggest challenge is to complete the physical integration of TNT within the FedEx structures. This acquisition was considered one of the largest in the transportation industry and currently the organization is “at the final frontier” as Nik called it. This integration involves all the planes, trucks and more than 700 facilities just in Europe operating on the same IT platform. “We are building our capabilities on API first micro services and enabling global platforms, that will serve more than 200 countries”, Nik shared with us.

Marina Bellini is doing an amazing job at BAT shifting to reduced risk products with great results. By creating new channels (incl. e-commerce), BAT, a traditionally indirect business, is directly connecting with customers. An impressive number of 13 million consumers is just a beginning of a journey whose target point is 50 million.

For a huge company like BAT, diving into innovation, going into startups and moving beyond fix IT structures is a huge challenge, but it works. Marina fully supported Thomas Mannmeusel’s mantra: 

“We are getting out of this IT and business thing, and we have a hashtag in the IT organization: IT, we are the business!” (Marina Bellini)

Barbara Poli pointed to the punctuality as the biggest challenge GNV faced last year. She explained the with a big fleet, lengthy logistic process and unexpected events, reducing the delays required a huge amount of work. NASA-like control room was created to coordinate all the processes and the IT team started to collect real time data and take direct actions on this data. With agile approach and data driven by design, the GNV business model went through a dramatic transformation that not only led to significant reduction of delays but also had a huge impact on financial margins.

Sebastian Grams is particularly proud of the creation of SEAT:CODE (shorthand for Center of Digital Excellence), direct fruit of a new IT strategy implemented in SEAT since the beginning of 2019. This completely innovative approach to automotive sector demonstrated that it is possible to earn money with pure software products.

GiraVolta is a first mobility platform created by SEAT:CODE (available for iOS and Android) that uses not only SEAT MÓ (motosharing service of SEAT), but is also multi-device and multi-vehicle ready. “Innovation really happens at the edge”, Sebastian says and also agrees with Thomas and Marina that breaking the silos is the key.

For Koen Vermeulen it was really difficult to talk about one particular project or achievement. Orange invests EUR 1,7 billion annually so picking up one project was a real challenge. However, there are quite a few “cool” projects like using drones to detect mechanical issues on mobile towers or alerting Orange’s customers about storms with information on how to protect electrical equipment and predict technical network issues.

Koen gave a very interesting insight on the project lifespan: “I don't like big projects, I like big visions, I like big ambitions but also what I liked is fast incremental implementation of these visions in our world. A year is an eternity and key thing is how do you test this hypothesis which basically that's what a project description is. It’s a hypothesis of what you want to achieve. I think projects that don't deliver tangible and testable results and value within a timeframe of let's say about three months, I don't think they should exist anymore.”

“Strengthening our technology muscle” was the biggest challenge for Patryk Dolewa. Building several in-house applications (e.g. new pricing engine and internal purchasing system) was only one of the big projects Patryk and his team worked on. Doubling the number of active users of Gemini’s e-commerce platform was a big success as well as moving to several public clouds. Patryk stressed the importance of separating personal data from sensitive data.

Find out what the panelists had to say about the sustainability in the full article available in our app exclusively for CIONET Members and join the conversation! 

After this insightful discussion we almost forgot that the aim of this unique reunion was also to announce the winners of the European Digital Leader of the Year 2021 in the B2B & B2C categories. The jury had an extremely tough choice but after some serious discussion it was democratically decided that:

• The European Digital Leader of the Year 2021 in the B2B category is Nik Puri, Senior Vice President IT at FedEx Express
• The European Digital Leader of the Year 2021 in the B2C category is Marina Bellini, Chief Digital Officer & CIO at BAT

We congratulate the winners!

Remember, you can also vote! We have opened the voting for the Most Inspirational European Digital Leader of the Year 2021. Go to https://link.cionet.com/VOTE21 and cast your vote!

The winner will be announced on December 15 at CIONEXT | The Year of the Tiger. What’s the 2022 IT Strategy of the European Digital Leaders of the Year? Register now at https://www.cionext.com/10