Members CIO Platform Nederland help each other to the 1.5 meter economy

It is all about to help each other to get better at dealing with digital technology and deploying it within their own organization without a commercial purpose. Especially in such an unusual and unprecedented situation, it turns out to be very useful to occasionally learn about the knowledge, insights and experiences of colleagues. A question is easily asked by various channels and there are always a few quick responses that will get you back on track. It’s also worthy to collectively approach a supplier with a question that would otherwise be asked separately by dozens of users and thereby increase the scarce capacity that is desperately needed elsewhere to deal with the crisis situation.

In many cases, this is sufficient and valuable. But some questions are a bit more extensive, which require a little more time and attention. For example, the question that became more relevant in mid-April, for example 'How are we going to ensure that employees can return to the office safely in any time?', 'How do you ensure a good distribution of your employees between teams?' 'How do you divide workspaces?' and 'Which IT tools can help?'. Questions that can provide a different answer for each office or production environment of each organization. 

By co-chairmanship of initiator Sjoerd Blüm, CIO at Schiphol Group, and Rikky van Osch, CIO at ONVZ and board member of the CIO Platform Nederland, a CIO Action Team (CAT) with the CIOs from five other members has took up the challenge. By the direction of the CAT, an Operational Team with 11 employees of our members and two bureau employees of the association went to work to provide the questions with the correct answers. In the meantime, the necessary information and inspiration has been gathered and shared. Since mid-April, four webinars on this topic have been organized: 

• A webinar about the information that was collected by Randstad from dozens of sectors and countries over the entire world.  

• A webinar on how VDL Nedcar relaunched her production facilities in Born after a few weeks of closure.

• A webinar in which fact sheets were presented on the answers to the five most pressing questions asked by the members. The fact sheets provide insights into which measures are possible, how they can be operationalised and which tooling is possible. With these fact sheets, those responsible for returning to the office/workplace can collect the ingredients they need in their specific situation.

• A webinar with three examples of useful IT tools.

To keep this information available, share experiences with implementation and address any new issues, an internal 1.5 meter community has been launched. The focus is now shifted to get a better view of the longer-term effects of the 1.5 meter economy. A first step to this was made during the 'Stay Strong' webinar held on June 9th to mark the 15th anniversary of the CIO Platform Nederland. There we were already looking at the trends and the opportunities for the coming months.