For the third year in a row, CIONET was invited by the Chinese outsourcing and technology company Datong to attend the Outsourcing forum in Jilin, China. This conference gathered Chinese and Japanese partners to discuss the opportunity of the outsourcing business in the beautiful province of Jilin.

Hendrik Deckers, Managing Director of CIONET gave a presentation on the general IT trends in Europe, based on our yearly survey in collaboration with Business & IT Trend Institute. In a second CIONET presentation, Frederic De Meyer zoomed in on the drivers and inhibitors of IT Services Outsourcing , as well as the major new developments in outsourcing in the European market. Both presentations can be found on Slideshare.

During the numerous discussions we had at the event we experienced a genuine interest in the activities of our CIONET community, and even a readiness to emulate our community. The president of Datong Inc., mister Li Nianfu, showed great interest in building a similar community in his province, so who know maybe soon CIONET will have a brother community in Jilin… Given the importance of China for every business, strengthening our relationships with Chinese CIO’s would certainly benefit our CIONET members as well.

While in Beijing in the first days of our journey we had a meeting with Camille Zheng and Forrest Lin from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, who are actually building the first Chinese CIO Alliance, presided by mister Xu Xiaolan. This C-CIO absorbs some 31 local economic and information committees, and over 100 enterprises.  C-CIO’s mission is to help CIO’s achieve their full potential (does this sound familiar?) through conferences, publications, research, consultancy and –of course- extensive networking among CIO’s.

C-CIO also organises the World CIO Forum, which was held for the first time in 2011 in Shenzhen, which attracted around 1000 top IT executives worldwide. This year’s WCF will be held in Xi’an early November. The forum will cover some vital subjects such as mobile innovation, green IT, Cloud Computing and CIO leadership. Of course CIONET will support this event, so stay tuned for more information in our next newsletter!