Last Updated on 8. July 2026
On June 9, IT decision-makers from all over Germany will gather in Hamburg. At the IT-Executive Forum hosted by the IT Executive Club, around 120 executives will gather at the Factory Hammerbrooklyn to discuss the issues currently at the forefront of the IT world: hybrid threats, digital sovereignty, artificial intelligence, and what the IT organization of the future will look like.
Frank Kneschke, Nils Gralfs, and Anne Bernemann are representing mgm consulting partners at the forum and are actively participating in the discussions within the “Rethinking IT” working group.
What’s on the agenda for the IT-Executive Forum
The forum features a format that is rare: open exchange, clear positions, and genuine debate. In the “Rethinking IT” working group, two sessions will address how the role of CIOs is changing and what the IT organization of the future will look like. Following this, Christoph Kastaun, CIO at Tchibo, will moderate the concluding panel, where the results of both groups will be brought together and we will share our assessments in a moderated discussion.
A question that won’t let us go
The question “Do we still need CIOs?” is not new. The Harvard Business Review posed it as early as 2000. What has changed: The starting point has become more complex, and the answers more urgent.
Our own CIO study on digital transformation has shown just how wide the gap between strategic aspirations and operational reality still is in many IT organizations. The strategy is in place. So is alignment with the business—at least on paper. What’s missing are levers, resources, and a clear vision of what an IT organization must look like to be truly effective in a world of SaaS, the cloud, and agent-based AI. This is precisely what we will explore at the IT Executive Forum together with around 120 CIOs who grapple with these same questions in practice every day.
Our white paper “Are CIOs Becoming Obsolete?” describes three target profiles for the CIO role:
- the co-architect, who helps shape the business roadmap;
- the integrator, who holds platform logic and governance together under federated responsibility;
- and the industrialized operator, who delivers professionally but loses influence if they cannot find answers to the new requirements.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to which of these models works in which company. But every IT executive must ask this question—and they must do so now.
After the Forum
We will report after the conference on the outcomes of the discussions and the topics that continued to occupy our minds on the way back.
