Audi’s head of IT wins European award

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,” em­pha­sized 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 S.p.A. and Ducati Mo­tor S.p.A., 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 with the Four Rings took fourth place as the best au­to­mo­bile man­u­fac­turer, di­rectly af­ter Google, Mi­crosoft and Ap­ple.