6 Highlights from CIO Events Across Europe in Early 2024

Hundreds of top IT leaders gathered for in-person and virtual discussions with their CIO peers across Europe in the first half of 2024. At Evanta Executive Summits, in particular, executives came together with peers in their same role and region for one day to share ideas, best practices and lessons learned.

The Executive Summit day is packed with peer-driven content, thought-provoking keynotes, private, closed-door discussions, and facilitated and casual networking opportunities. All of the content is driven by the Governing Body Members of the communities, who are IT leaders and current practitioners, ensuring that it is as relevant and timely for CIOs as possible.

Here are six of the most-talked-about and best-reviewed topics and discussions by CIOs and for CIOs in early 2024.

1. CIOs and Cyberattacks — Partnering with the Business to Communicate Risk and Recover Fast at the UK & Ireland CIO Town Hall

Recovering from an existential business crisis is a team sport, and CIOs must ensure that stakeholders are fully educated on the potential impact of disruption, enabling fast recovery and business continuity. These challenges, and more, were discussed at the UK & Ireland CIO Town Hall in February. 

The panel agreed that effective security awareness begins at the top and is a two-way conversation between CIOs and the board. IT leaders must demonstrate why good cyber hygiene matters in our personal and professional lives to foster a culture of security ownership. Shared responsibility for cybersecurity and its impacts will come about when CIOs equip the business to actively participate in decision making.

One CIO community member said: “Great set of speakers covering real world industries. It's always great to hear about issues and challenges in the real world and not just theoretical ones.”
 

1. Where Vision Meets Reality — Building Northvolt’s Digital Platform at the Nordic CIO Executive Summit

Northvolt, a sustainable battery producer, is an organisation with no legacy and an ambition to create a company with high-level digitalisation at its core. Fredrik Ohlson, CIO and VP IT, shared his inspiring journey of building a digital blueprint and incorporating a “digital at scale” mindset in the IT organisation. 

He focused on three areas: Governance; Technology; and Culture. The IT organisation is achieving cost efficiency, adaptability and scalability by creating systems that dictate how the business will work, rather than the building systems that support current business processes. This approach comes with cultural change management that starts with IT. Fredrik summarised by sharing the importance of building a team around a strong vision. 

Here’s a comment from a CTO based in Stockholm: “Very inspiring and unexpected with so much governance. Thank you for being open with challenges and learnings.”
 

1. Empowering Leadership and Diverse Perspectives in Digital Transformation at the Italy CIO Executive Summit

“What does empowering leadership mean to you?” asked Joanna Pamphilis, Global Head, Investments & Securities Digital Products at UniCredit, at the beginning of her keynote address. From Joanna’s perspective, empowering leadership is all about unlocking the full potential of teams. 

This style, known as servant leadership, is emerging as an important approach for successful digital transformation. And CIOs are at the centre of this – they must act as active participants to cultivate autonomy and accountability, engage in a shared vision and entrust teams. In summary, transformation requires digital leadership, diverse perspectives, and people-centric change management to collaborate, adapt and innovate. 

CIO peers shared their thoughts on the keynote: “Super inspiring and actionable.” Another said: “Extremely engaging. I particularly appreciated the concept of leaders being servants, which I believe in strongly.”
 

1. Strategic Leadership and the CIO — Unlocking Potential at the UK & Ireland CIO Executive Summit

CIOs face lofty expectations and a changing set of skills necessary to be successful. They are expected to build healthy team cultures remotely, understand the nuances of inclusive leadership, manage high levels of ambiguity, and the list goes on. To meet this moment, how can technology leaders support their business and their people by developing successful teams at all levels? 

Ashling Cunningham, CIO at Irish Life, shared her thoughts around the importance of fostering an inclusive mindset and how it contributes to successful transformation. Reducing unconscious biases, whilst difficult, is also important when building strong, diverse teams, and driving digital adaptability at all areas of the business is critical to success.

One CIO Community Member said this: “Love the pragmatic approach and real life examples.”
 

1. Translating 9 Spokes of the Tech Strategy Wheel into Action at the Nordic CIO Executive Summit

Markus Sontheimer, Group CIDO at ISS, presented his technology strategy lessons learnt from digitising ISS, a 350,000-strong organisation. Markus began by sharing how he set up a framework for transformation – he defined strategic ambition and pillars and a wheel framework. In the centre sat stable, agile and cyber secure IT operations and services with eight hubs around it, including cost management, people and organisation, right sourcing and infrastructure and security services. 

In the second half of the session, Markus talked his peers through how he set ambitions for maturity levels for each of the strategy domains from 2021 to 2025 to become the technology leader in the IFM industry. 

A CIO Governing Body member had this to say: “Very interesting and insightful with learnings to bring back home.”
 

1. The Costs of Complexity — How CIOs Can Cut Both! at the UK & Ireland CIO Executive Summit

In today's challenging digital landscape, reducing operational complexity is a powerful force of cost optimisation and efficiencies that ultimately drive business outcomes. IT is continually asked to do more with less, avoid negative impacts to user experience, and maximise existing investments. 

In this Executive Boardroom session, 16 CIOs discussed how to mitigate the effects of tool sprawl, ensuring automated workloads run smoothly and cost-effectively. 

CIO participants shared their thoughts after the discussion: “Great topic and very good prompt questions. Very well facilitated and good contributions from participants.”
 

As we close the chapter on the first half of the year, CIOs from Evanta’s European communities had this to say about their recent experiences:

I've been to several summits now. Content keeps getting better. Great mix of topics from the soft skills through to practical case studies. Having real case studies presented is very insightful.”

- UK & Ireland CIO Community Member

Richer in knowledge. Richer in new contacts.”

- Nordic CIO Community Member, based in Sweden

Very insightful and useful to confirm and question my line of action in my business management.”

- Italy CIO Community Member

This event is always on my calendar.”

- UK & Ireland CIO Community Member

Evanta CIO Community members in Europe continue to plan topics and sessions for Town Hall discussions, Inner Circle dinner gatherings and Executive Summits in the second half of the year. 

To find and register for an upcoming CIO Community event, sign in to MyEvanta. If you have not yet joined your Evanta CIO Community, apply to join here for access to all peer-driven community gatherings.