Meet the transformational CIOs who are currently leading their businesses into the digital future.
Explore their most important initiatives, leadership goals, and how they see their roles evolving in the near future.
This time, in CIO Insights, we feature Thomas Angelius from Ramboll.
It’s always for the future
Reaching across the middle, accompanied by a lot of dialogue with the business side, Ramboll’s CIO, Thomas Angelius, has earned an indisputable mandate to bring Ramboll into its digital future.
Something was not right when Thomas Angelius joined Ramboll in late 2018 and was given the task to “fix the basics” in Ramboll’s IT department,
“I started asking my stakeholders what they weren’t getting from IT, and they couldn’t really articulate it. They weren’t unhappy with the data we delivered, for instance, to create 3D models. The closest we got was, ‘We don’t know what you do in IT, but it’s not what we asked for.'”
Trying to turn the headwind into a tailwind for the IT department, Thomas concluded that the core of the problem was the absence of a clear and healthy dialogue with the business,
“When I looked at what we delivered, it was fine, but perception is reality, and they perceived that things weren’t running well. We needed to communicate a lot louder and clearer that we work to make them as successful as possible. I travelled a lot to have that conversation with my business colleagues and ensure that we kept the dialogue going.”
It’s our role to reach across the middle
It also meant that Thomas had to approach the dialogue with Ramboll’s business leaders step-by-step and not fast forward the conversation to the role he felt should be IT’s role,
“In that situation, you can’t tell a business leader that ‘we are also the business’, which is fundamentally what I believe. I had to take more humble steps, given a very different starting point. I also believe that success is tied to expectations. When people are unhappy, it’s because their expectations haven’t been met. My second conclusion was that we lacked a place to have a shared conversation about expectations between the business and IT; a forum to bridge the gap in understanding. Often, even after the business feels that they have described what they need, it’s not enough for the technology function to start. It’s our role in IT to reach across the middle, not wait for them to perfectly articulate their needs. The perfect requirement specification doesn’t exist.
So I decided to establish governance for this: a structured conversation in an IT committee with top leaders every six weeks with an agenda that I drive but making clear that the business sets the direction.”
It took about two years to gain the legitimacy which Thomas feels that his department now has,
“It was a difficult path with much friction along the way; without legitimacy as a business enabler, people won’t collaborate or help solve issues – they just complain upwards in the chain of command. At a Group Leadership meeting, the CEO eventually said that he thought IT was running well, so he wouldn’t act as a helpdesk anymore. If anyone had issues, they should talk to me, not him. It was a sign that our mandate was now indisputable.”
“I was and still am designing my organization not for now, but for the future.”
It wasn’t just the dialogue with the rest of the organization that was on Thomas’ mind. There were lots of other major tasks, including a much-needed internal clean-up in IT,
“I certainly wasn’t bored. When I started, the IT organization was fragmented, spread across different locations due to Ramboll’s growth through acquisitions. We needed the capacity, but I had to assess whether the right competencies were in the right places for our overall business.
So we created a delivery hub with helpdesk and other functions in Chennai, India, moving 25% of our positions there in one go. As it so happened, we started building up in Chennai just as the Covid pandemic struck, and strict lockdown was introduced in Chennai. This meant that we had to recruit a lot of colleagues virtually and ask them to work from home, never having set foot at a Ramboll office. This worked surprisingly well, and we were able to support the business working 100% during the pandemic despite local lockdowns and restrictions across the 35 countries in which Ramboll operates. This earned IT some street credit and me a seat at the table where senior leadership discusses strategy, and I have remained there ever since.
My focus was and is to answer the question: where should we be in ten years as Ramboll grows? Can IT scale and still be good enough? I was and still am not designing my organization for now but rather for the future. It’s always for the future.”
Thomas and his team’s transformation of IT also developed his role as CIO,
“Coming from the business side in previous jobs, my perspective is shaped by that background. Within the organization, I talk about myself as a business leader first. That is my perspective no matter what I focus on in IT.
An example is IT security: When I started, I didn’t think we were in the right place. IT security is a trade-off between business risk and cost because it’s challenging and expensive. Furthermore, our clients expect us to manage the balance between increased security and the flexibility limitations that follow. Our collaborative model with clients in many countries means that we co-create, e.g., building designs, sharing draft models and data with them, necessitating openness.
So it was important to me to raise a business risk discussion with Ramboll’s executive team and board of directors about different scenarios for achieving a given risk profile and at what cost. It’s a business discussion, not an IT discussion.”
I’m focused on how people change together and succeed
“I’m here to help the business. I don’t want to be the Department of No, but the one who helps and highlights possibilities. I’m here to drive changes, which always involves both technology and people.
The latter is always the hardest. I’m focused on how people change together and succeed, making respect crucial for me. Everyone should be treated respectfully, regardless of our differences. I work with people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, ages, religions, etc., and they all need to feel included, even though we’re not physically together. Therefore, my team is my most important sounding board in decision-making. I respect their perspectives and am curious about their ideas.
At the end of the day, work should be enjoyable for everyone. We should all get more out of it than simply economic compensation. Ramboll’s purpose is ‘Building societies where people and nature can flourish,’ which aligns perfectly with my leadership goals and was one of the reasons I chose to work here.
We’re still looking for the big, clear AI business cases
One of the most important strategic business discussions in Ramboll right now is, of course, how to create value for the business with AI,
“We’ve been working with analytical AI for the past 6-7 years, developing advanced products in areas like wastewater analysis, biodiversity restoration, and microclimate analysis. Now, with generative AI, we have an ambitious corporate strategy, sponsored by the Board of Directors, where we aim to make a significant difference. I’m excited about the potential, but we’re still looking for the financial pay-back.
A few months ago, we launched RamGPT, trained on our data and project documents. We often say, jokingly, ‘Ramboll doesn’t know what Ramboll knows,’ because we keep growing and are joined by thousands of new colleagues every year. So if you’re a newly hired engineer in Singapore, how would you know about some exciting project from two years ago in Denmark? RamGPT allows everyone, including new employees, to build on our entire knowledge base. In 2023, we hired more than 3,000 people, so RamGPT adds some concrete value to our business.”
We sell expert services, and AI can’t match that expertise. Yet.
But the AI future in Ramboll is not just for Ramboll’s employees,
“We also believe that we can create new AI solutions for our clients, both when it comes to drafting 3D models and in the more text-heavy business areas, not replacing our experts, but becoming a valuable tool for the business. AI provides the most probable answer while we seek the right answers. We sell expert services, and AI can’t match that expertise. Yet. But it can help our engineers become more effective.”
Constantly having the future in mind, Thomas recently took some big organizational steps to make sure that his organization could support Ramboll’s strategy to keep growing,
“In 12 years, we might be 35,000 people in Ramboll. I am dedicated to supporting that growth, focusing on our costs in IT and our talent attraction, which is quite challenging these days. So we partnered with Tata Consulting Services, outsourcing parts of IT to them, primarily 300 employees who handle operations. TCS is huge and can achieve lower unit costs, allowing us to grow well and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint. They can quickly set up organizations locally and provide new technologies, thus supporting Ramboll’s agile organization.”
“IT is crucial for most business processes, but often not prioritized.”
“For my role, this hopefully means that I can spend more time on innovation. I’ve spent a lot of time re-organizing and managing operations. Now, I want to focus on development and tuning even more in on where Ramboll should be in terms of technology in five years.”
Thomas is also thinking of contributing outside of Ramboll at some point,
“I’d like to play an active role on other companies’ boards of directors, but I see a gap in the understanding of its role among top management in various companies. IT is crucial to most business processes, but often not prioritized. The most important thing I do at Ramboll is to support the top management in making the right decisions by highlighting the business impact of technological opportunities or limitations in different decisions. We have this dialogue at Ramboll, and we are fortunate to have a Board of Directors with some IT-savvy board members.
But that’s not the case in all companies, and that surprises me. I’d be interested if asked, as these are exciting technological times. We often discuss this in the CIO Transformation Board, which I am happy to be a part of, because besides providing input to the political agenda, it works systematically to position CIOs as skilled leaders contributing to the business beyond ‘server management’. Because we do.”
The CIO Transformation Board
In the Danish ICT Industry Association (IT-Branchen), we have the CIO Transformation Board, which brings together the most visionary CIOs from Denmark’s large and medium-sized companies. These are CIOs from businesses where digitalization is a strategic part of the business — but where there is also a desire to do more than just digitalize.
We aim not only to highlight Denmark’s most talented CIOs and share experiences and best practices across industries, but also to set the agenda in the media and with politicians regarding Denmark’s and the business sector’s digital future.
The CIO Transformation Board is created for those who also want to help find the new balance between people and technology. For those who have a stance and want to help influence our green transition, address the skills shortage, and strengthen growth in Denmark.
