CIOs who spend more than 10 or more than 20 with the same employer: they are in the minority. Chris Borremans, general manager of Komatsu's European IT organization and CIO of Komatsu Europe is doing even better. For more than 31 (!) years, Borremans has been working for Komatsu Europe: initially as ICT Infrastructure Manager - a job he held for more than ten years - and later as General Manager European IT (almost 22 years in the meantime). Since 2003, Borremans has been the CIO of Komatsu Europe International. Before his time at Komatsu, Chris Borremans worked for one other employer: Pauwels Trafo Belgium where he was a systems analyst for about ten
Komatsu Europe International is the European and Vilvoorde-based headquarters of the Komatsu Group, based in Tokyo, Japan. Komatsu is a leading manufacturer and supplier of equipment, technologies and services for the construction, forklift, mining, industrial and forestry industries. For more than a century, Komatsu machines and services have been used by companies worldwide to develop modern infrastructure, extract minerals, maintain forests, and create technology and consumer products. The company's global service and distribution networks harness the power of data and technology to improve safety, productivity and optimize performance.

Chris Borremans specializes in consolidation, simplification and cost reduction like no other. He is a CIO who continuously focuses on accelerating and automating the group's business processes. But at the same time, he always considers the pros and cons of new, emerging technology before embracing it decisively. Over all these years, he did see the emergence of new technology and applied it within Komatsu when there was a real need to. For example, all of the manufacturer's construction machines are tracked via sensors: the location, but equally whether the oil is still at the right level or even exactly who is in it. That data should then enrich yards with valuable data and even automate them (in part) where possible. But Komatsu is betting equally well on drones to generate 3D images and on software. The underlying idea? Ensuring that customers can use rich data to determine how, how much and to where to have their machines excavate soil, for example. And yes, that obviously involves a lot of cyber security, including its own Security Operations Center (SOC) that watches over security around the clock. Or as Chris Borremans summarizes it: quality prevails over cost, but cybersecurity is even more important.

Philippe Van Belle's personal mission? Making people happy, connecting the dots, and ultimately achieving more through the use of technology. That is what he has been doing for almost 14 years now at insurer AG Insurance as CIO and since April last year as Chief Information & Technology Officer. Philippe Van Belle sees IT as a long-term process, with strong people and a well-defined architecture as important levers.
The large-scale 'replatforming' program of the past 3 to 4 years is the proverbial icing on the cake and is within AG the largest technological transformation program of the past 30 years. The technological foundations of AG Insurance have been thoroughly addressed over the past four years, with the last three years entirely devoted to the massive migration from the good-old mainframe to Windows servers with the necessary APIs and a very competitive TCO. More than 80 million lines of code - some 100 terabytes of data! - were converted to new infrastructure that now supports more than 14 million transactions and 50,000 batches ... per day. A hitherto fairly unseen feat in our country, of which Philippe Van Belle is particularly proud: not least also of his teams that brought the work to a successful conclusion. Now that the replatforming is behind him, Philippe Van Belle can start the next step: rolling out future-proof technology and completely transforming the existing business. The combination of the new platform with a new data analytics platform in the cloud already looks very promising. AG Insurance will thus become a data-driven organization with the smallest possible gap between data analytics and operational data. All in all, more than enough arguments to give Philippe Van Belle a place in the top three: also because Covid-19 hardly caused any delays.
The new foundations provide significant annual cost savings and also keep future costs under control: for example, additional capacity is only deployed when the acceleration of digitization and additional use of data require it. In this way, CIO Philippe Van Belle hopes to meet the expectations of increasingly digital customers.

The 47-year-old Nicolas Van Kerschaver has been with Liantis since 2000: the merger group formed in 2018 with ADMB, Provikmo and Zenito. Initially as a consultant, later as financial and commercial director and project manager before finally becoming CIO there. Today he is responsible for 270 employees in the Solution/IT department of Liantis: the integrated hr services group with some 1,900 employees and with more than 220,000 independent entrepreneurs and 67,500 employers among its clients. This year, this will result in a turnover well in excess of 200 million euros.
During this unification, Nicolas Van Kerschaver ensured that three different IT cultures, platforms and systems became one, with My Liantis as the digital flagship to customers: the platform where entrepreneurs, employers and more and more of their employees find their digital tools. With this mega-project, Nicolas Van Kerschaver brought the bulk of Liantis to the cloud, going into co-development with Microsoft. That good foundation was necessary to build a strong digital platform.
Under Nicolas' leadership, Liantis was transformed from a classic IT organization to a product development organization. Digital product management ensures that not only the output but also the outcome of the digital initiatives was dramatically increased: a lean development approach for new solutions (based on the SAFe methodology, or scaled agile framework for enterprises). The time to market of digital solutions was thus reduced by 40%, allowing customers to see the My Liantis digital platform expand with new applications and capabilities almost daily. For example, this has allowed Liantis to keep up with rapidly changing regulations to support the self-employed and enterprises in the storm of the corona pandemic. Nicolas Van Kerschaver has helped shape Liantis digitally and is working on the future of the solutions so that they can support entrepreneurs even better. Because that is what drives him: allowing entrepreneurs to do business.