Get to know our new member
Dr. Ulrike Handel
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We need real innovations for sustainability and transformation.

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New tasks sometimes arise in the most unusual ways. I recently joined the advisory board of Aparavi, a provider of a data management solution. The contact to Aparavi's EMEA CEO Gregor Bieler came about - as so often - through my network.

The decision to join the advisory board was made rather quickly after our first conversation for one simple reason: Aparavi's solution is a no-brainer - on the one hand, companies can use it to analyze, structure and organize their large, often confusing data pools and thus use them more efficiently, and on the other hand, they can do business more sustainably by identifying useless data and simply deleting it. For me, this is a prime example of how smart innovation, digitization and environmental protection mutually benefit and reinforce each other in order to bring about positive changes in companies. When working with the other members of the Aparavi Advisory Board and the leadership team around Gregor Bieler, I will contribute on exactly these points, because I don't know any company that is cleanly positioned in terms of data systematization and therefore see enormous potential for Aparavi.

The definition of and prerequisite for corporate success are changing

I believe that companies have a holistic responsibility and must constantly evolve - for their own good, for the good of their employees, but also for the good of society as a whole, and today sustainability is a key part of this. In all my previous positions, and especially in my management roles, the latter has been particularly important to me. For sustainability to become a lived practice, it has to be brought into an organization from the top and exemplified there. To this day, for example, I don't own a car, but always ride a bicycle (even on business trips thanks to bikesharing services) and also have one or two private "environmental tastes". I'm also a member of Leaders for Climate Action, the ReAct initiative and the face of the new German Zero campaign, in order to draw even more attention to the issue and find new ways to do more. Cloud centers, for example, are already one of the biggest CO2 emitters today, and every terabyte less data stored lowers the emissions emitted - it's simple places like this that we need to start, which is why I'm so excited about Aparavi's solution.

At the same time, it also supports companies in their transformation process: Particularly in the case of highly complex groups of companies like the ones I've met, whose individual companies have often been bought in addition and which are often in different life cycles, from young start-ups to established groups steeped in history, a veritable data chaos can quickly arise. And I have experienced how difficult it is for companies to part with old data. All this data needs to be organized and structured. Without this step, growth and efficiency are simply not possible, and the pace of transformation is constantly picking up.

Great goals can only be achieved together

I am looking forward to working together on the Aparavi Advisory Board and am convinced that, with our operational experience and certainly very individual perspectives, we will be able to provide Gregor Bieler and the rest of the management team with valuable impetus to ensure that Aparavi achieves its ambitious goals of becoming the key tool for the digitization of companies of all sizes and lifecycles. And even if we on the advisory board don't immediately have the right answers to important questions, we are sure to find someone in our extensive networks who can help us.