Rick van der Lans is an independent consultant, speaker and author, specializing in data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), application integration and database technology. He is the managing director and founder of R20/Consultancy. He is an internationally acclaimed speaker who has lectured worldwide for the last 25 years.

In the summer of 2012 he published his new book "Data Virtualization for Business Intelligence Systems". He is also the author of one of the most successful books on SQL, the popular "Introduction to SQL", which is available in English, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, and German. He has written many white papers for various software vendors. Rick may be contacted by sending an email to info@r20.nl and followed on Twitter via rick_vanderlans.

Frederic De Meyer founded The Institute for Future Insights (i4fi) in September 2011 with the specific mission to help companies and industries understand and anticipate long-term trends and adapt their strategy to them so as to ensure long-term success.

Frederic is a seasoned strategic market development professional with over 20 years of experience as - amongst others - market intelligence manager and business development manager for emerging markets at technology provider Cisco, business development manager at research company IDC and consultant at public relations consultancy Weber Shandwick.

Frederic is a frequent keynote speaker on megatrends and corporate strategy at industry and company events. He recently published the influential book ‘The impact of megatrends on your business’, available on Amazon.com. Frederic also runs a successful blog about long-term trends , and can be found on twitter via @fdemeyer.

Peter Hinssen is one of Europe's leading thought leaders on the impact of technology on our society. He has a focus on the consumer adoption of technology, on the impact of the networked digital society, and on the Alignment between Business and IT. He collaborates with organizations in the areas of IT Strategy, Transformation, Fusion and Coaching, in Europe as well as in North America.

Peter Hinssen is co-founder of Across Group and CEO of Across Technology. An entrepreneur, lecturer and writer, he is also the former chairman of Porthus and has been an Entrepreneur in Residence with McKinsey & Company.

In the 90s, Peter Hinssen was founder and CEO at e-COM Interactive, a leading Internet consultancy firm, where he implemented some of the first large-scale Internet and e-commerce projects in Europe.

Peter is currently involved as a coach to executives to develop future innovation perspectives, and is a board advisor on subjects related to innovation and IT. He develops executive education workshops and awareness sessions to bridge business challenges with IT solutions, and to leverage the innovation potential of IT.

He lectures on IT Strategy at various business schools in Europe such as the London Business School (UK). Peter is a passionate keynote speaker frequently welcomed at Global CIO Forum and conferences around the world.

His book Business/IT Fusion. How to Move Beyond Alignment and Transform IT in Your Organization (2009) has become a best-selling management book. In his more recent book The New Normal, he demonstrates how changing customer behaviour causes organisations to innovate in terms of products, services and organisation. For more information on this, visit Peter's own Web site.

Remco Blom is Senior Consultant at BiZZdesign. Following his business studies (specialization in Organization, Development and Design) at Radboud University Nijmegen, he worked in the fields of Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture, Change Management and Business Development. Models, design and change have always been part of his work.

As a consultant, he helps national and international organizations in various sectors e.g. media, education, (semi-)government and financial services to re-invent their business models and walk alternative paths. Also the road to implementation with an improved architectures and more agile processes is part of his engagements. In his work as consultant and trainer in Business Model Management, he always puts communication first. Of course, you can follow Remco on twitter via @blomr.

Suzanne Robertson is a principal and founder of the Atlantic Systems Guild. Suzanne is co-author of "Mastering the Requirements Process" (Addison-Wesley Edition 3, 2012), a guide for practitioners on finding requirements and writing them so that all stakeholders can understand them. Her other requirements book, "Requirements-Led Project Management" (Addison-Wesley 2005) addresses how to use requirements as input to planning and management. Current work includes research and consulting on the management, sociological and innovative aspects of requirements. The product of this research is Volere, a requirements process, template and techniques for assessing requirements quality, and for specifying requirements.

Suzanne works with organisations to apply innovative techniques and fresh thinking in all of their systems development activities. She is author of many papers on systems engineering. Some of these papers are on her web site www.systemsguild.com and www.volere.co.uk. She also speaks at numerous conferences and universities. She is a member of IEEE and BCS and on the board of the British Computer Society's Requirements Groups. She was the founding editor of the Requirements Column in IEEE Software. Other interests include a passion for the opera, cooking, skiing and finding out about curious things.

James and Suzanne Robertson are principals and co-founders of The Atlantic Systems Guild.

Luc Verbist is CIO of De Persgroep. As graduated civil engineer construction, Luc started his career as underwriter of technical insurances at Mercator in Antwerp. Here he built up a vast experience in legal and contractual matters and sharpened his negotiation skills.

After 5 years, he moved to the publishing industry, the VUM groep (now Corelio). He had the responsibility of information manager in the commercial department and managed all ICT projects for that department. He later on moved to the ICT department of VUM were he became responsible for all ICT projects on company level. After 10 years in the publishing industry, Mr. Verbist changed from industry sector and started working at IBM as CIO and as Operations Manager of the capital markets division in Belgium.

Within a year, De Persgroep headhunted him away to take his current position as CIO, a position which Luc holds for 15 years now. As CIO he is heading an ICT staff of 160 and has an operational responsibility for supporting the Belgian and Dutch activities. Luc is closely involved in the merger and acquisition strategy of De Persgroep and is leading the ICT integration of newly acquired businesses.

Prof. dr. Bart Van den Bosch is CIO at the University Hospitals Leuven (UZ Leuven).

After graduating as a civil engineer in Computer Science, Carl Tilkin joined the former Kredietbank and started his career in a data security function. In the years to come he was attributed several responsibilities both in infrastructure and application development. In 1995, he became a member of the senior management team and was in charge of all Kredietbank’s system engineers. After two years he became responsible for Kredietbank’s datacenter.

In 1998 Kredietbank, Cera and ABB merged to become KBC. Carl was appointed general manager for ICT development in the new group. At that time Y2K, Euro and the merger were the top priorities. In 2001 the ICT development of the insurance company was added and, beginning 2002, Carl became the CIO in charge of the whole of ICT - production, infrastructure and development.

In addition, on 1 May 2006, Carl became responsible for the ICT departments in the Central European entities, with the mission to create a 'shared service center' for the KBC group. The consolidated ICT budget of KBC Group amounts to more than 750 mln. Euro and employed more than 4400 FTE of which 400 in Chennai, India.

Carl has a special interest in middleware, component-based design, change management and process-oriented views on ICT. His major concerns today are controlling ICT costs and their evolution together with aligning business and ICT. In recent years, subsequent implementations to organize these matters have been conducted in KBC.

On 1 October 2011 Carl joined the Cronos Group, a large Belgian system integrator. In this position, he focussed on strategy, business development, infrastructure and cloud computing.

On 2 May 2012, Carl started as CIO of the Acerta group, a leading HR services provider in Belgium. Acerta specialises in offering advice on all HR-related matters and in the digitalisation and organisation of administrative processes concerning payroll management, social security, child benefit and branch formalities. Currently Acerta is investing in a large ICT renewal program to support its strategy.

Carl's specialties are: Infrastructure and data center, Business ICT Governance, Software factoring, IT architecture, Offshore, Procurement, Service management, Creating highly motivated teams, and Business models for the cloud