Antonietta Mastroianni
Chief Digital & IT Officer
Proximus
Antonietta Mastroianni has been a member of Proximus Exco since April 2021. Before joining Proximus, she was Group CIO and CDIO at the Danish TDC, and served as both Head of IT and Business Partner Manager at Swiss Sunrise. She also performed under several roles in Swisscom and H3G Italy.
Antonietta is an influential IT leader with 20 years of international telecom experience in leveraging technology to drive organisational growth, performance, and profitability. She focuses on digital and agile transformation, the impact of leading-edge technology on business, technology, and product innovation, as well as IT and telco transformation. She has worked in multiple European countries (Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, and Belgium) and serves as a Council member of Etis, as well as a member of the Italian Order of Engineers. Currently, she holds the VC Finance seat in the Board of Directors of Gaia-X.
Antonietta studied Computer and Automation Engineering at University of Siena. Furthermore, she is a member of the Order of Engineers of the province of Caserta.
Learn more about leaders in the Benelux CIO community here.
Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
I studied Computer and Automation Engineering at the University of Siena and gathered my first telecom experience in Milan, working at Vodafone and 3. Since then, I have leveraged my desire to innovate and passion for technology to drive organisational growth, embarking on an international journey with many exciting challenges. This international journey started in Switzerland, where I worked for Swisscom and Sunrise, later moving to Denmark to become Group CIO of the TDC Group. Throughout these experiences, I led agile and digital transformation and implemented leading-edge technologies, with the ambition to provide the best digital customer experience.
Last year, a new chapter started when I became CDIO at Proximus in Belgium, and was appointed as the VC Finance chairholder in the Board of Directors of Gaia-X, an ambitious European initiative with the potential to unlock a lot of opportunities.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
As a leader, your main objective should be to inspire and motivate with a clear and innovative strategy. For your organisation to achieve the ambitions of that strategy, you should rely on the available expertise, empowering experts to innovate and drive success.
Leadership is not about presenting your teams with a manual on how to get the job done. Rather, it’s about providing the freedom and trust so that your teams will find the best and most innovative ways to get the job done. If you ask a painter to paint your wall blue, you will get a blue wall. If you stimulate their creativity and simply ask them to paint, you will get something truly original.
With disruption being a key theme of the past few years, where do you see your role as a CIO going in the next 1-2 years?
With the rapid pace at which new technologies arise, it will become increasingly difficult to predict the market needs of the future. As a CIO, the focus will be on making your IT stack ready to integrate these technologies and remain rapidly adaptable to new innovations and market needs that we are not currently aware of. Looking at the exponential rise in value of some of these recent market disrupting technologies, a CIO will need to be able to make bold and rapid decisions, enabling them to benefit from these innovations and remain relevant.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in the role as a CIO?
Dare to be bold and challenge the status quo. It is your role as CIO to show your business partners the immense potential and opportunities that different technologies can offer. Make sure you are ready to integrate new technologies and look for the right partners that can strengthen your capabilities. Surround yourself with experts and people that know better. As Confucius put it, ‘If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.’
Tell us 3 fun facts about yourself.
- I am a painter and a writer.
- I love fashion.
- I have 7 cats.
What is the value of participating in a professional community through Evanta?
I strongly believe in collaboration and think this should be a core focus of companies now and in the future. We need to reach out to partners and bundle forces to bring new, innovative solutions to the market. I do not think we do this enough today and professional communities, like the ones Evanta provides, are needed to boost collaboration. I’m sure these communities will increase in importance and continue to be the origin of many exciting ideas and solutions.
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