Category Archives: Allgemein

Interview with VALENTINA DAIBER, Chief Officer Legal & Corporate Affairs, Member of the Board of Directors of Telefónica Deutschland Holding AG
For you as a manager: What does it mean to strive for sustainability?
Responsibility and sustainability are firmly anchored in my area of accountability as a board member. It is therefore very important to me that we take a pioneering role in the fight against climate change. It is one of my personal core beliefs that businesses can and should set the pace. Working in the digital industry, I continuously remind everybody that our digital life has an impact on the environment and society. However, I do everything in my power to unleash the positive effects of digitalization on the environment. Digital economy plays a key role on the way to a more sustainable world. It is up to us to ensure that positive effects are widely used and that negative effects are limited. I am convinced that we as a telecommunications provider can make a significant contribution to the digitization of Germany and thus to a more sustainable way of living and working.

Interview with STEFANIE CHIRAS, Vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, Red Hat
What makes open source the basis for innovation and sustainability in IT?
Open source stands first and foremost for principles that stimulate innovation and promote collaboration, transparency and inclusion. The end result is a sustainable innovation engine fueled by the passion of innovators. Only through transparency and inclusion can an active community flourish and benefit society. Transparency means open access to information, open communication between all participants and comprehensible decision-making processes that serve as guiding standards. All this is necessary to ensure that as many people as possible contribute, speak up and voice their opinions and that the innovation continuously builds. Inclusion ensures that diverse ideas and points of view are included and all voices are heard, because a diverse community will always generate more innovation and a heterogeneous community will always achieve better results than groups consisting of lone fighters.

Interview with PRITI PRABHOO, Vice President, Product Management Lead, Climate 21 Project, SAP SE, Walldorf, Germany
Sustainability is often seen as a moral obligation, but not as a dimension of success. How can we reframe sustainability as crucial to business success?
If we look at what is happening globally, then we see that climate change is actually an urgent planetary problem. Just in the past ten years, we have seen record-breaking fires, famines and storms. And this has to be addressed by businesses too. We at SAP are calling it the ‚Green Line‘, where it needs to become a core part of business not only to gain profitability (top line) and operational efficiency (down line) or business model innovations but also to take climate action. That should become the sustainable norm for companies. The shareholders will expect it, the consumers will expect it, the customers will expect it. It won’t happen just because it is ordered top-down or because there is a compelling event like regulations passed in the EU or America or Asia, it has to come from within an organization to live a sustainable enterprise philosophy.

Interview with WESLEY SPINDLER, Sustainability Strategy Director, Accenture
You are an advocate of the so-called circular economy. What is the difference between the traditional and the circular economy?
The traditional economic system in which we currently exist is linear, meaning we extract resources, use them, and then throw them away (or at best recycle). The circular economy reinvents this unsustainable ‘take, make, waste’ model by closing the loop and keeping resources in productive use in a ‘take, make, take, make’ system, while addressing some of our most pressing environmental challenges, as well as presenting significant financial value to organizations – $4.5 trillion by 2030.
#ada18 Insights – Ideas to change the world

#ada18 is a wrap. Thank you sooooo much!
Hey everyone,
we took some days off and we are now back at it. First things first: wow! You made #ada18 such an amazing experience for us that was worth all the hard work and time we put into it making it happen. We loved how you interacted & participated and hope that you enjoyed being part of the Ada Lovelace Festival Community as much as we do. Continue reading

Technology – why it is a great support to solve risky situations (Sara Lozano Pérez)
Sara Lozano Pérez, Digital Transformation Program Lead at Information Management Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, loves challenges, innovation, technology and people. In this interview, Sara explains how the rule “70% Listen – 30% Speak” contributes to finding ideal solutions to customers’ problems and the role technology plays in this context. Continue reading

I can imagine a blockchain-based system for voting machines (Dorothee Bär)
Digital Transformation has become of high importance in a majority of fields and sectors, be it economy, industry, politics, career or private life. Hence the German government established the new post Minister of State for Digitization in March 2018. Dorothee Bär is the first politician to hold this office in Germany. In this interview she tells us about the best moments so far, her weirdest social media encounters as well as future plans and visions. Continue reading

Blockchain – When does it really make sense? (Sonja Greve)
Being passionate about Blockchain, Sonja Greve specialised in this technology. As a member of DB Systel’s Blockchain crew, she drives Blockchain’s flagship topics for Transportation & Logistics products, as well as developing and implementing new products and services for distributed ledger technologies. In this interview Sonja Greve explains why every competitive company should at least be familiar with Blockchain technologies. Continue reading

Platforms – how SMEs & startups can take part in the future competition of ecosystems (Svenja Falk)
Platforms are controlling the markets. 10 out of the 10 most valued companies in the world are platform companies. For Svenja Falk, Managing Director at Accenture Research, future economic competition will be held between ecosystems and not individual companies. In this interview Svenja explains how SMEs and start-ups can play a role in this competition.

How to start a career in IT without being a computer scientist
Why should you as a non computer scientist work in IT industry? What are the challenges for career changers? And how did Sonja Wittke and Silke Tautorat from QAware do it? Continue reading to get all the answers! Continue reading