DACH CIO Executive Summit

Exclusive to Governing Body members and select guests, this dinner is a can’t-miss opportunity to connect with your peers prior to tomorrow’s Executive Summit. Please join your colleagues for an evening of good food, wine, and lively networking.

Venue: Holbeinstrasse 1, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The buzz words are many: Cloud, Digitisation, Transformation, Zero Trust, etc. all of which, whilst technically “cool”, do not deliver business level outcomes or initiates, rather they become a cost centre for the business. Thus slowing down the adoption of the technology and limiting the business benefits. Learn how adopting true technical distribution of your various assets: users, workloads, processes and data; will creates business success and reinvent how technology is seen by the business. Specifically, you will learn how others are taking a Zero Trust approach to:

• Distributing your technical assets and be empowered in your organisation
• Adopting a Zero Trust architecture to reduce costs and complexities across the business
• Keep things simple and secure to drive competitive advantage in your industry

In fast-changing business environments, you need to be agile, be more resilient and become a magnet for top talent. For CIOs, it’s more important than ever to understand your digital capabilities and use them to create a winning culture. But what else can CIOs do to attract top talent into their organisation? 

Join this boardroom to discuss:

• Rethinking technology and culture in a hybrid work world
• Providing workspaces that help attract and retain top talent
• Collaborative strategies to drive meaningful ways of working

As organisations continue to accelerate digital business, transformation initiatives create risk exposure, with APIs forming a major attack surface. Proactively securing your environment from API security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and design flaws are among the biggest challenges that IT leaders face. But how can CIOs identify and eliminate attack surfaces before an attack, and actively test APIs for vulnerabilities throughout the lifecycle, in addition to preventing real-time attacks?

Join this session to discuss:

• Mitigating API security risks to better enable digital transformation
• Ensuring risk management keeps up with the pace of digital business initiatives
• Making API security a key element of transformation projects

2022 has seen the role of the CIO undergo a gear change within their organisation. Armed with newfound influence and leverage, IT Leaders are poised to progress their organisations along the digital business path. But transformation programs can still stall behind organisational resistance and, in some instances, lack of motivation. This boardroom will explore the strategies being used to re-engineer organisations to be agile, adaptable and well-placed to deliver on their digital vision, together with what really works, and what the key pitfalls to avoid on your journey. Specifically, you will discuss how to:

• Have effective conversation and communication with the board to drive your initiatives forward
• Ensuring you have the right culture and future skills in place to fuel transformation
• Identify digital opportunities that drive adoption and customer satisfaction

The world faces formidable sustainability challenges, and technology can be a game-changer in driving real change. With the impact end-user computing has on climate change, as IT leaders we have the collective opportunity to make a lasting impact on the future of the planet. CIOs play a critical role in leading this change through championing sustainable computing and technology choices. Join this session to understand how CIOs can contribute towards a carbon-free future. 

Specifically, this session will cover:

• Adopting a 360-degree view of sustainable IT across the lifecycle of computing devices
• Leading digital sustainability in your organisation and empowering sustainable technology
• Driving sustainable decision-making in IT through platform choices

The CIO’s role in the enterprise and the leadership skills needed to succeed continue to evolve. Especially in the digital age, IT Leaders are expected to go above and beyond the “traditional” role definition of managing and operating technology in secure, efficient and effective fashion to achieve business objectives. Given that, how should CIOs advocate and promote the important work they do across the organisation to demonstrate the value of IT as a business enabler and key contributor to an organization’s success? 

Join Thomas Kleine, Country Digital Lead at Pfizer Germany, as he shares his thoughts around:

• Why marketing and communication should be part of the IT strategy and why it should sit in the priority list of the CIO
• Strategies and tactics around the value contribution of IT
• Marketing for your own discipline – practical examples on how IT Leaders could communicate the value proposition of IT

One critical hurdle IT teams face when overseeing cloud migration is ensuring decisions are taken with quality, real-time data. The shift to the cloud is often costly and may require an overhaul of IT infrastructure and collaboration with other business units. For cloud migration to be a success, CIOs must ensure data across the business is accessible, secure and relevant, whilst business expectations for migrating their company's digital assets to the cloud are met. During this peer discussion you will discuss:

• Combating the hidden data management and protection costs in the cloud
• Exposing the hidden cost and cyber vulnerability of cloud-native data protection
• Meeting business expectations for migrating company assets to the cloud, whilst prioritising and securing data in the cloud

The future of applications provides organisations with nearly unlimited possibilities to create business value. Increasingly, applications have become a primary driver of business strategy, yet the ability to think in terms of applications is still difficult for many enterprises. CIOs have an enormous opportunity to use techniques such as low-code adoption in more strategic ways. It’s important for organisations to have a sense of what these strategic opportunities are so they can use low-code to deliver on their most ambitious goals. 

This boardroom will discuss how CIOs can:

• Solve targeted problems by delivering and deploying new applications in as little as a few weeks
• Enable business units to iterate and deploy applications more often, allowing for more impactful end products delivered in a secure way
• Improve operational efficiency and drive innovation by eliminating the barriers that legacy systems present

Connect with like-minded peers in a one-on-one setting through Evanta’s Peer-to-Peer Meetings. You will be matched with peers in your community based on your shared interests and priorities.

Wages for IT roles are inflating at an increasing rate, and new employees are being poached days before they start their new roles. What can a CIO do to compete with these enormous challenges? Recruitment and retention demands require out-of-the-box thinking to stay ahead of the curve. In this discussion, we'll consider ideas to combat this fundamental issue within the industry.

In this interactive session, you’ll come together to brainstorm:

• How CIOs are encouraging their teams and retaining their rosters — what makes your employees happy?
• What can be done to combat staff turnover — overcoming exponential wage inflation
• Rethinking your job requirements — diversifying the entry point to the IT profession

As digital business maturity flourishes, IT teams are looking at how to support and empower the business through the best operating model. Drastic shifts in how IT approaches project management to support new digital business models are taking hold. IT leaders must create an operating model that supports both a product management approach and agile governance throughout the department to reinforce a more fluid and customer-centric business.

In this session, your peers will discuss:

• Key components of an outcome-based operating model for digital business
• Structuring a product management service and delivery approach
• Executing an agile governance model to influence culture and decision making

As digital business continues to accelerate and cloud work continues to grow, many enterprise assets live outside the old “walls'' of the organisation. The role of the browser is changing rapidly. It’s now a critical endpoint; a strategic productivity and security layer in the enterprise tech stack. CIOs must now ensure they have enterprise-grade security, speed and stability to empower the workforce and mitigate the risk of harmful web-based threats. 

Join this interactive boardroom to discuss:

• How business transformation is forcing CIOs to think differently about architecting their environment
• How changing employee behaviours and the rise in flexible working is driving the need for new technology
• Reconceptualising traditional ideas of how to approach security within the enterprise

Shoot for the moon, if you want to achieve something. But do not forget that technology and business always go hand in hand. Join this closing Keynote to hear from Sinanudin Omerhodzic, CIO, Aldi Nord as he shares his perspectives on:

• Time to enter a new world – Next generation of discount empowered by technology
• Collaboration is key – interdisciplinary teams with a strong customer orientation and a joint understanding
• An innovative environment – the new campus in Essen, Germany, the perfect environment for sharing and driving joint innovation