Tamara Lievens

She started out as a UNIX operator on military mainframes in the early 1990s. It was the start of 10 years in defence in which she mostly learned management skills and gained experience with innovative technology. Now, she sits on the executive team steering the digital backbone of MPET, Europe’s largest container terminal. Tamara Lievens is one of the nominees for CIO of the Year, and her candidacy rests less on a single flagship project than on three decades of near-continuous immersion in mission-critical IT environments.

Lievens has been Chief Information Officer at MPET (Beveren) since October 2021, overseeing digital strategy, cybersecurity, innovation and IT governance for an operation that runs around the clock. Her mandate spans infrastructure, networks, applications, data platforms and enterprise architecture, alongside compliance obligations such as NIS2 and ISO 27001 that have become unavoidable for operators of critical port infrastructure. Under her leadership, MPET has pushed forward with platform modernisation, data initiatives, artificial intelligence and private 5G, framed “not as isolated pilots but as building blocks and enablers for the terminal’s future operations.” MPET operates 24/7, meaning any governance failure carries immediate operational consequences for one of Europe’s busiest logistics hubs. She underlines that technology investments at MPET are meant to translate directly into operational resilience rather than serve as showcases.

What stands out in her profile is the continuity of her relationship with the port sector. She first joined MPET, then still known as MSC Home Terminal, in 2007 as ICT Infrastructure Manager and CISO, rolling out core infrastructure (Cisco Nexus, VMware, IBM SVC, Palo Alto) and drafting the terminal’s original security policy. She later became ICT Assistant Manager and CIO, joined the executive committee, and managed the relocation of ICT services between docks, before leaving in 2015. In 2021 she returned to MPET in the top IT role. In between, she held governance and security roles at Interoute/GTT, the Flemish government’s information agency, and chemicals group Oleon. That trajectory gives her a level of institutional memory about the terminal’s technology landscape that is hard to replicate.

Lievens frames her ambition less around technology delivery than around organisational change. “The CIO of today is no longer the manager of systems, but an architect of change, a business partner and a catalyst for innovation,” she says, arguing that a CIO’s relevance is now measured by the ability to connect business strategy with technical execution rather than by systems uptime alone. She places people development at the centre of that philosophy: “Technology is only successful when people are successful.” Colleagues, by her own account, describe her as inspiring and connecting, crediting her particularly for coaching and knowledge-sharing, qualities easier to assert than to verify externally, but consistent with a career built substantially on governance and people-management roles.