Presented by EU Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, the awards recognize the success of CIOs who have increased their organization’s competitiveness by using Information Technology (IT) to increase efficiency, and to pioneer new products, services and business models.
Insead eLab, the school’s Center of Excellence for research on the global knowledge economy, and Cionet collaborated to select three winners from a field of 13 prominent finalists, identified by the country offices of the Cionet network.
The top three were selected by a panel of judges from Insead and Cionet in the following categories: Technology-driven CIO, Business process-driven CIO, and client-driven CIO.
The 2012 European CIO of the Year Award winners are:
Technology-driven CIO: José Manuel Inchausti, chief information officer, MAPFRE;
Business process-driven CIO: Pieter Schoehuijs, chief information officer, AkzoNobel; and
Client-driven CIO: Oliver T. Bussmann, executive vice president and global CIO, SAP AG.
“With the growth of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at the nucleus of organizations’ strategic success, the role of the CIO is continually expanding and becoming more critical,” said Bruno Lanvin, executive director of Insead eLab.
“We are pleased to join Cionet in recognizing 2012 CIO leaders. Today’s CIOs are faced with the unprecedented challenges and opportunities of massive trends such as broadband, social media, cloud computing and ‘big data’. We are proud of contributing to show how, in such a complex and rapidly moving environment, CIOs adapt and lead, and how their respective organizations — public or private — can benefit from a better integration of ICT in their strategies and operations.”
Part of the selection criteria examined how well the CIO adjusted his or her IT strategy to meet the needs of a business; the successful deployment of his or her team to meet business requirements and to effectively manage business priorities.
The final three were selected on the basis of two key factors: the CIO who best represented a specific type of leader in the designated categories and who embodied the diversity of this year’s 13 finalists.
“Once again,” noted Nils Olaya Fonstad, associate director of Insead eLab, “the findings suggest that any organization that does not strive to have at least one of the three types of IT-enabled leaders is failing to pursue important opportunities to create value and be competitive in today’s increasingly interdependent and dynamic global economy.”
Concurrent to the CIO of the Year awards, Insead and Cionet released the results of two in-depth European business surveys: (1) 2012 IT Enabled Leadership Report, “Three Ways to Thrive: How Chief Information Officers are enabling their organizations to grow and strengthen in today’s challenging economy“; and (2) “Enhancing the business value of broadband: Recent views from chief information officers.”
2012 IT Enabled Leadership Report — compiled from a survey of 188 CIO’s in seven European countries — identifies the roles of CIOs in strengthening and enabling organizational growth in today’s challenging economic climate.
The survey looked at their strategic priorities in their roles leading IT within organizations and the amount of time CIOs spent in 2011 on: managing IT services; working with non-IT colleagues; managing enterprise-wide business processes; and working with external customers and partners.
The report provides summaries on each of the 13 finalists of the 2012 European CIO of the Year Awards and a detailed profile of Wu Choy Peng, former CIO of Singapore, now group chief information officer of the Neptune Orient Lines Group in Singapore, a recent awardee of the 2012 CIO of the Year in Asia Pacific and a keynote speaker at CIO City 2012 (ciocity.com/).
The broadband survey narrates key insights from CIOs on enhancing the business value of broadband.
As a result of the successful collaboration on the 2011 European CIO of the Year awards and the 2011 IT-Enabled Leadership Report between Cionet, Insead eLab and her team, Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda, requested that Cionet and Insead eLab conduct a survey on the business value of broadband.
The online assessment was completed by110 CIOs from over six European countries, representing a variety of sectors.
The findings uncovered four important sets of insights with regards to enhancing the business value of broadband. They include:
1. The impacts of having greater broadband connection speeds (rather than simply having access to broadband);
2. The key drivers of future demand for greater broadband connection speeds;
3. The challenge faced by many CIOs of managing across locations with different connection speeds; and
4. Barriers to adoption that CIOs believe the European Commission could help remove
Drawing from these insights, Commissioner Kroes said: “This study shows that broadband delivers for businesses — whether it is by helping staff work collaboratively, or by giving access to important new resources like the cloud.”
Commissioner Kroes expressed her desire to continue strengthening collaborative and constructive engagements going forward so that The European Commission can best enable their organizations to operate and innovate competitively.”
“Highlighting effective uses of ICT and building future IT-enabled leaders is the shared responsibility of multiple stakeholder groups,” said Hendrik Deckers, managing partner of Cionet International.
“These reports are the most recent results of fruitful collaborations between Insead eLab, Cionet and the European Commission. We look forward to many more.”
Cionet is the biggest community of IT executives in Europe. Its membership represents an impressive body of expertise in IT management.
