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’.
05 Jun 2015 | 3153 Views | By Autocar Professional Bureau
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 ...
This is an Autocar Pro Plus article. Subscribe to continue reading.
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.