Audi’s head of IT wins European award

The European business network CIONET has chosen Mattias Ulbrich, head of IT and Organization at Audi AG, as the ‘European Chief Information Officer of the Year’. The 48-year-old received the award during the CIO CITY conference in Brussels yesterday in front of 170 IT executives from international companies.

The Eu­ro­pean busi­ness net­work CIONET com­prises more than 5,100 IT ex­ec­u­tives from 18 coun­tries and pro­motes di­a­log be­tween IT spe­cial­ists of var­i­ous dis­ci­plines. The award ‘Eu­ro­pean CIO of the Year’ has been given an­nu­ally since 2011 in recog­ni­tion of Eu­ro­pean IT vi­sion­ar­ies from large cor­po­ra­tions, small and medium‑sized en­ter­prises and the pub­lic sec­tor. The 12‑mem­ber jury is com­posed of IT ex­perts from the fields of busi­ness, sci­ence and pol­i­tics, and pri­mar­ily as­sesses the con­tri­bu­tion made by IT to a com­pa­ny’s in­creased com­pet­i­tive­ness. With their in­no­v­a­tive IT strat­egy, Mat­tias Ul­brich and his team suc­ceeded against fi­nal­ists from six coun­tries.

“In the dig­i­tal era, in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion is the key to suc­cess. The best ideas for the ac­tive shap­ing of rapid trans­for­ma­tion are cre­ated in a team,” stated Ul­brich. By means of in­tel­li­gent IT so­lu­tions, he says that Audi has im­proved the processes of pro­duc­tion, lo­gis­tics and qual­ity as­sur­ance for ex­am­ple, and has thus in­creased pro­duc­tiv­ity while re­duc­ing costs. On the sub­jects of Audi con­nect, the con­nec­tion of cars with their en­vi­ron­ment, and Audi City, the dig­i­tal show­room of the fu­ture, the Audi IT team co­op­er­ates very closely with col­leagues from the Tech­ni­cal De­vel­op­ment and Sales di­vi­sions.

“What most im­pressed us was how suc­cess­fully Mat­tias Ul­brich and his team have co­op­er­ated with all de­part­ments to con­vert the ground­break­ing po­ten­tial of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies into a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage,” ex­plained Dr. Nils Fon­stad, jury mem­ber and sci­en­tist at the Sloan Cen­ter for In­for­ma­tion Sys­tems Re­search of the MIT. For ex­am­ple, Ul­brich and his staff suc­cess­fully strength­ened the brand’s dig­i­tal im­age, im­proved its cus­tomers’ ex­pe­ri­ence and cre­ated new rev­enue sources.

“IT spe­cial­ists play a key role in the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of our so­ci­ety,” em­pha­sised In­dra­jit Baner­jee, di­rec­tor of the Knowl­edge So­ci­ety Di­vi­sion of UN­ESCO, in his speech at the award cer­e­mony.

Au­di’s IT de­part­ment em­ploys more than 1,000 peo­ple and sup­ports well over 1,500 in­di­vid­ual de­part­ments within Audi AG. It also sup­ports the 100‑per­cent sub­sidiaries of the Audi Group, Au­to­mo­bili Lam­borgh­ini SpA and Ducati Mo­tor SpA, with key IT is­sues. The same ap­plies to over 20 other sub­sidiaries in Ger­many and abroad as well as the world­wide sales com­pa­nies.

The com­pany is re­garded as an at­trac­tive em­ployer for IT spe­cial­ists and will this year re­cruit nu­mer­ous ex­perts, in the area of Audi con­nect for ex­am­ple. In a re­cent sur­vey of uni­ver­sity grad­u­ates car­ried out by Uni­ver­sum, the brand took fourth place as the best au­to­mo­bile man­u­fac­turer, di­rectly af­ter Google, Mi­crosoft and Ap­ple.