A conversation with Niels Tavano, Senior Data & AI Transformation Manager at Madison Partners
Before joining Madison Partners, Niels Tavano spent years inside large corporate organisations, among them Colruyt Group, one of Belgium's most operationally demanding companies, where he led data, analytics and AI delivery across sizeable and complex teams. He has worked at scale, inside systems where change moves slowly and every decision passes through many hands, but he is known for the way he reframes a problem. Where a discussion has stalled and each person is defending their own corner, he steps back, listens, and puts the question differently, until the people around the table are looking at the same thing.
At Madison Partners, we work across four focus sectors: healthcare, food manufacturing, HR services, banking and insurance. Niels spent considerable time in food manufacturing before his focus moved to healthcare, where the demands on a data and AI practice are among the steepest anywhere.
When we spoke to Anne-Marie Leys recently, one of our managers at Madison Partners, your name came up quite often. She described your way of thinking, and how you bring order to problems that most people find tangled. How does that land?
"Throughout my career I have worked alongside specialists, people with deep expertise in their own field. What I noticed is that coming in from outside can be an asset. You see things the people inside have stopped noticing. What matters is asking the right questions, and asking them in a way that opens people up.
Let me try with a metaphor. Picture that everyone in an organisation is holding a balloon. Their own balloon, different colours, different shapes, different sizes, each person focused on the one in their hands. What I do is step back far enough to see all of them at once, and then work out what they could become together. What figure we are trying to build out of all these separate pieces.
Take our work at Telenet group. Two Gen AI capabilities were taking shape at the same time, one built from the ground up, one already in place and evolving, each with its own team and its own momentum. The challenge was holding them in a single direction as they grew. My work was to keep that shared picture in view, and to hold it there long enough for the organisation to act on it."
Anne-Marie also mentioned that your 'unconventional' background might be your single biggest asset. Do you see it that way?
"Possibly. I studied Greek and Roman civilisation, which sounds like it is as far from a data science degree as you can get. But classical history teaches you to read people and institutions. Why they made the choices they made, and how information and power moved between them. I never saw a wall between that and what I do now. History is the study of why people made the decisions they made, under pressure, with incomplete information, inside organisations pulling in different directions. That is what I do now."
People have been forced to adapt all through history. How do you see that now, with AI reshaping the way we work?
"The one constant across human history is change itself. Every era has faced a shift that felt unprecedented, that provoked real fear and real resistance. The industrial revolution did not feel like progress to the people living through it. It felt like disruption, like loss, like the ground moving under something familiar. And every time, societies found a way through. People adapted, rebuilt, and made things that would not have been possible before. What came after was different, and in time it was better.
I see the same arc now with data and AI. The disruption is real. So is the opportunity. If you understand history, you can hold both at once without losing your nerve. To anyone who finds it more unsettling than exciting, I would say look at the pattern. Every wave has felt unsurvivable to the people standing in front of it, and every time, what was built afterwards turned out to be worth the crossing."
Before Madison Partners, you built serious experience inside one of Belgium's most data-mature organisations. What did those years at Colruyt Group give you, and what made the move to a boutique consultancy the right one?
"Colruyt Group gave me a great deal. Scale, to begin with. What it means to deliver data and AI services across a large, complex organisation, how decisions get made at that level, and where they stall. But it went well beyond scale. It was where I really learned how you build solid foundations, how structures hold an organisation together, and how change actually moves through a company of that size. That grounding still shapes how I work every day.
There came a point, though, where I wanted to work differently. In a large corporate, the structure is the point. It is what makes the scale possible. Here, you are pushed to think past the process, past the role, past the first answer that presents itself. There is room to do the work the way you believe it should be done."
You work across different sectors, but healthcare has become an area of real depth. What drew you to it, and what does the sector demand?
"Healthcare is the sector where the stakes are most visible. The mission is care. Everything else, every governance model, every prioritisation framework, every data initiative we help build, exists in service of that. It changes the nature of every conversation. You are never only talking about efficiency or return on investment. You are talking about decisions that affect patients.
At Madison Partners we have been building a considered approach to the sector. Part of it is a financial steering model that gives hospital leadership a live view of where money goes and what it produces. Hospitals rarely see their financial, operational and clinical picture in one place, which makes every investment decision harder than it should be. In a setting where a euro spent on structure is a euro not spent on care, getting that view right matters enormously. Alongside it sits an AI-driven direction that connects clinical, operational and financial data in ways most hospitals have not yet achieved. The aim is to build the foundations that make sustained action possible.
What I see in healthcare is a lot of capability that has not yet found its structure. Teams that know their work well, data that exists but is not connected, ideas arriving from every corner of the organisation without a shared framework for deciding which deserve focus. The opportunity is to organise what is already there, and give it somewhere to go."
That is precisely what the work at AZ Sint-Elisabeth in Zottegem looked like in practice. Can you walk us through it?
"They already had a lot in place. A data team that knew its work, a reporting infrastructure that delivered, and colleagues across the organisation who believed in what data could do. What was missing was structure. A way to take the ideas and requests arriving from every direction and weigh them methodically."
Over five weeks of dedicated sessions, working closely with the hospital's leadership and data team, the engagement produced a governance model, a prioritisation process, the groundwork for a steering committee meeting every six weeks, and a defined AI lead role ready to be activated the moment the hospital's broader strategic direction is set.
"Healthcare never runs in a straight line. Priorities shift, agendas change. Part of our role was making sure the work kept moving. Following up, pulling people back in, keeping the thread alive. When you show up that consistently, the work reflects it."
The CFO, Nele Vanmeirhaeghe, told us the structure gave her team the confidence to take initiative, because they finally knew where they were going. Before, an enthusiastic team kept falling behind, unsure what created value or what to prioritise. Does that match what you saw?
"It does, and it is the part of the work I care about most. Structure sounds 'dry', but what it produces is confidence. When people know how decisions get made and where the organisation is heading, they stop waiting for permission and start taking initiative. That shift in a team is worth more than any single deliverable.
And none of it happens without leadership behind it. Having Nele Vanmeirhaeghe and Bart Pardon, the CFO and the CEO, involved from the start, willing to make the case for foundations that would not pay off the following month, made an enormous difference. It shaped how the work landed across the whole organisation."
Last question. You are CIO of a large organisation that wants to scale intelligently. Where do you begin?
"People first. Before any technology decision, before any roadmap, you need to understand your workforce. Who does what, where the knowledge lives, what the organisation is capable of today. Most leaders move past this because they want to press forward. But you cannot build well on a foundation you do not yet understand.
Second, add smartly. The instinct in most organisations is to keep building on top of what exists. More tools, more dashboards, more layers. I would start by stepping back to see what is already there. Which processes are running, which technology is in place, and how it could be linked together more intelligently. Only then does it become clear what you genuinely still need in order to fill the gaps. That discipline, stepping back before you step forward, is what separates smart scaling from simply adding more.
And third, measure what matters. The real question is whether the work is creating genuine value, and whether that value can scale. It is easy to count how many initiatives are running. Far more useful is knowing which of them deliver something worthwhile, and whether the organisation can take on more without losing its footing."
Niels Tavano is Senior Data & AI Transformation Manager at Madison Partners, where he leads data and AI engagements across industries with a particular focus on healthcare.