The CIO Who Saw a Merger as Permission, Not Crisis | Modern Tech POV with Igor Collell
In this episode of The Modern Tech POV, Dennis Woodside, CEO at Freshworks, sits down with Igor Collell, CIO at Seqens, a social housing provider in the Paris region that manages homes for more than 230,000 people across 310 municipalities. Seqens was formed in 2019 from a six-company merger and a simultaneous demerger — leaving Igor's team with something most CIOs never get: no legacy IT estate to drag forward. Most leaders in that situation talk about consolidation and harmonization. Igor's team destroyed their IT and rebuilt it.
In this episode you'll gain insight on:
- Why a structural rupture is permission, not a crisis — and what most CIOs miss when they get one
- How Seqens went full-SaaS and built a single service spine for 650 superintendent offices and 1,600 employees
- The reality of AI in production today: call center triage, summarizing 80,000-family government surveys where ~80% of responses are unchanged, and drafting first-pass answers for IT
- How the fracture numérique — the digital divide between residents who can self-serve and those who can't — shapes every technology decision the team makes
- What it actually looks like to modernize at scale while "running a marathon at sprinting pace"
The best IT leaders don't just inherit complexity. They use the moments of disruption to build something better. Subscribe for more insights from technology leaders who are driving measurable business results in our Modern Tech POV series.
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