03.10.2020

Agility, resilience and innovation culture: The IT Strategy Days 2020

Germany’s largest and most important IT management congress for CIOs and IT decision makers took place for the 18th time in Hamburg from 13 to 14 February 2020. More than 800 participants, including more than 500 IT managers from around 400 companies, attended this year’s conference. Numerous speakers presented their knowledge on topics such as SAP, cloud strategies, artificial intelligence and digitalization.

The IT Strategy Days are among the most important discussion platforms for IT decision makers in Germany. Under the motto “SCALING UP THE DIGITAL FRAMEWORK”, everything revolved around the topic of digital transformation. Agility, resilience and a culture of innovation are among the drivers of digital business, which is why they were considered the focal points of the congress.

Exciting input from experts

The company SAP gave interesting insights into the company’s internal transformation to an intelligent company in a presentation. Here, SAP attaches great importance to integrated end-to-end business processes, the use of artificial intelligence, real-time control and experience management. Nevertheless, in addition to the digital transformation, care should be taken not to leave the employees out in the cold, but to “take them along” accordingly. 

Siemens Healthineer’s CIO, Stefan Henkel, also believes that technology alone is not enough to advance digital culture. The individual employees in the company also play a key role. He explained this in an interesting presentation on IT architecture, with particular emphasis on the three strategic thrusts of Siemens Healthineers, all of which are based on digitization: expanding precision medicine, transforming healthcare, and improving the patient experience.

In addition to many informative presentations, exhibitors such as Fujitsu, Adobe, Microsoft and IBM presented themselves with various exhibition stands. Under the motto “Future of Work”, the companies Box, Slack, Okta and Zoom were also represented and presented their “Best of Breed” technologies to the visitors. As an operator of cloud content management, the American company Box has set itself the goal of using cloud technology to guarantee the simplest and fastest possible access to internal and external documents. Okta, too, has already been able to establish itself on the American market by guaranteeing automated distribution of access authorizations.

Comments on the IT Strategy Days

Carmen Grosse, Enterprise Account Representative of Box, comments on her impressions of the IT Strategy Days:

„I found the overall atmosphere at the IT Strategy Days very open. We were actually surprised that there were many different companies and industries, different job profiles, but also decision-makers represented. In two days full of discussions, we were really able to gain a lot of valuable insights into the industry. Since the event was not quite as big, we had plenty of opportunity to talk to many interesting people.“

Tobias Burkhart, Account Executive Financial Services & Insurance Industry at Okta, also draws a positive balance of the IT Strategy Days:

„This was a very interesting event for us. A large number of participants were involved, the interest was very high. I also estimate the level of the participants very high. They were often very strategically oriented and had a clear focus on the topic of digitization in general. So we were very satisfied with it.“

On February 25 and 26, 2021, the IT Strategy Days will again be held at the Grand Elysée in Hamburg. As this year, not only will there be many interesting expert lectures, but also offers such as CIO keynotes, CIO forums, master classes, user roundtables and breakout sessions will be on the agenda again.

Source cover image: MBF editorial staff

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