Ingo Paas CIO of the year 2022

Ingo Paas, CIO at Green Cargo, took home the heaviest IT award of the year when media house IDG's publication CIO Sweden had a gala dinner at Berns in Stockholm on Monday evening. In tough competition from IT managers at companies such as Northvolt, Ericsson, Axfood and Kronofogden, he won the award, which was handed out for the 18th year in a row. The winner was chosen by an independent jury.

The jury's reasoning reads:

"With a clear focus on the business' goals and needs, this year's CIO has taken digitization to a level that has lifted not only the IT function, but the entire organization. With a great deal of personal responsibility, this leader has carried out the necessary changes, which have resulted in a much-talked-about innovation in which the out-of-date has now been made modern. This year's CIO is a courageous innovator, and a role model both internally and externally, who dared to take on a conventional legacy in an unconventional way."

– What we have achieved together has been noticed and I would like to give a big compliment to all our fantastic employees and consultants, who contribute with great commitment and self-confidence! We are far from the finish line and probably will never get there. Regardless, we have succeeded, and we should be proud of that. Today we will celebrate, tomorrow we will raise the bar one more notch, says Ingo Paas.

Ingo Paas started at Green Cargo in 2019, recruited as an important cog in the transformation program started by the then newly appointed CEO Ted Söderholm. By implementing a completely new platform strategy in the cloud, he quickly got results. Above all, it was possible to reduce the dependence on foreign consultants for the mainframe environment and move development home to Sweden. In this way, they have gone from four releases per year to 300 releases per year.

When Ingo Paas was nominated as a finalist for the title CIO of the Year, CIO SWEDEN's justification was:

"Ingo Paas is an action-oriented CIO who lifted Green Cargo from outmoded to innovation leader in Europe. One of his biggest impressions on the company is how he solved the company's problems with system change with drive and innovative thinking. With the restructuring of the work processes, and the establishment of a low-code platform, the IT department has now developed a series of applications that have resulted in large savings, enabled collaboration with large customers, and increased delivery capacity. He is described by the management as a role model in leadership, and by the employees as a true innovator.”

– An absolutely decisive success factor for what we have achieved is the trust I have received from Green Cargo's management. Although there have been tight financial frameworks, I have been given free rein by CEO Ted Söderholm to really make the changes I deemed necessary, and that is probably quite unusual in the cio world, says Ingo Paas.