Olaf Riedel

Background

About Olaf Riedel

Having been a professional swimmer in Berlin at young age, competitiveness, teaming and "can do" attitude have been playing an important role during my entire professional and private life. After graduation I decided to join a practical college as a trainee with Nixdorf Computer AG and as a student at Berufsakadamie Mannheim, studying economics with a focus on information technology. During this classroom oriented college time packed with hands-on company experience at Nixdorf and intense semesters, our class "MW88D2" won the 1988 Nixdorf trainee competition: We've had our first management training with Kurt Bendlin, decathlon bronze-medalist at Olympia 1968 in Mexico which was shaping all of us. During university I was fascinated by the spirit and enthusiasm of the Arthur Andersen organization which I joined right after university in 1991 as an audit assistant in Hamburg. On the basis of my IT know-how I was soon involved into Andersen's first IT auditing approaches and 1996 as a manager I had the chance to build our IT audit team with Lars Seidel, Ludger Weigel and Michael Isensee being the first ingenious team members. We were growing fast, expanding team and activities in Hamburg, but also in Berlin and Hanover, growing to more than 50 people in the early and adding additional services like information security, program management, and IT transformation to our portfolio helping our multinational clients to transform their IT landscapes and businesses. After the merge of Andersen and EY, at the new EY organization I had the opportunity to build the IT Risk & Consulting team in Germany, Switzerland and Austria (GSA), take over responsibility of Risk Consulting and act as a COO for Consulting in GSA with Markus Thomas Schweizer, now a 1,300 people business. During all these times, the transformation journeys of my clients have been at the heart of all our activities and in 2017 I had the chance to move the transformation needle as EY's Chief Digital Officer and about a year later as a sector leader for Technology, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications. Since then, digital topics from AI, cloud, cybersecurity, quantum computing to blockchain, metaverse and also ESG got a stronger focus and are the driving elements of change in my clients' strategies. I am delivering results to clients straight-forward and with my soul which makes up for the success of clients' business model transformations. Privately, I am married to a wonderful wife and have four unique kids. Spare time: running, sailing, hiking, skiing, reading & vegan cooking