Ulandi Exner

President of the IITPSA and Group IT Executive, Vunani Limited

Ulandi Exner has been in the ICT industry for almost two decades. She is Head of IT at financial services company Vunani Limited and was recently appointed as the President of the Institute of IT Professionals South Africa (IITPSA).

Ulandi holds a BCOM in Informatics as well as a CISSP and CISA certification. She is passionate about technology and innovation and is dedicated in helping people to develop their skills and raise their professional standard.

With an intimate understanding of both business and technology, she is fully aware that the field of ICT has moved beyond "keeping the lights on" and therefore must be regarded as one of the business's key decision drivers.

Professor Helena Barnard

Gordon Institute of Business Science

Helena Barnard teaches in the areas of innovation, strategy and international business. She completed her PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey in the USA in 2006 with a dissertation on how firms from developing countries use investment in the developed world as a strategy to increase their competitiveness.

She has published academic research in Advances in Qualitative Research, the Journal of Management and Governance, and the International Journal of Technology Management. She has presented her work at numerous competitive conferences, e.g. the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business, European Academy of International Business and Globelics (Global network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence-building Systems).

Neville Willemse

Head of Consulting, Gartner Africa

Neville has been in the IT industry in South Africa for the past 38 years. His career started in the Operations environment then progressed through Programming and Analysis, Sales and Management. He was with IBM for 29 years and among others, held the positions of Banking Branch Manager, MD of the Corporate Business Division, Director of the Mainframe Division, Director of the Networking Division and IT Solutions Executive. After leaving IBM, he was MD of Conscripti (Pty) Ltd, the local representatives for Tata Consulting, a major Indian software development and consulting house. He joined META Group in 2002 as Sales Manager and moved across to Gartner in 2005 as Consulting Manager when Gartner acquired META Group.

Ranka Jovanovic

Editorial director, ITWeb

Ranka is editorial director and founding member of ITWeb. For the past eight years, she has led ITWeb's editorial team to grow ITWeb into SA's premier IT publisher, with a reader base of over 80 000 IT and business professionals. ITWeb published a daily online IT news update; a monthly business IT magazine, Brainstorm, and a weekly IT news digest magazine, iWeek. Ranka has also been programme director and chair of a number of conferences and executive forums hosted by ITWeb and its content partners.

Prior to joining ITWeb, Ranka was editor of InformationWeek Southern Africa and deputy editor of ComputerWeek. She immigrated to SA in 1994 from Yugoslavia, where she was involved in education, general publishing and IT publishing for over 10 years.

Adrian Schofield

Manager - Applied Research Unit – Wits University

Adrian Schofield is a manager at the Applied Research Unit at Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering. In this position Schofield is responsible for leading research activities focused on the ICT sector in Africa.

Schofield's past achievements include holding the title of president at the following establishments: Information Industry SA as well as the Information Technology Association of SA. In 2000 he was also elected vice-chairperson for Africa of World Information Technology Services Alliance.

Schofield is also an active member of the Project Steering Committee of the Savant project, the Executive Council of the Computer Society of SA, and the ICT Sector Steering Committee at NEDLAC.

Tony Parry

Executive director of the CSSA

Tony Parry was appointed executive director of the Computer Society of South Africa (CSSA) in 2007.

He has over 20 years' experience in IT, having started his IT career with Cobol and Natural Adabas. Among the degrees he holds is an honours degree in African Languages and Linguistics from the University of the Witwatersrand, and an MBA from Henley Management College in the UK. He is a member of a number of professional bodies, including the Institute of People Management (SA), the Institute of Directors in Southern Africa and is a professional member of the Computer Society of South Africa.

Immediately prior to joining CSSA, he was CIO of Shared IT Services at Barloworld Limited, having spent almost 18 years with the Group. He has served in a number of capacities in the Barloworld Group's various divisions and associated companies, and spent 17 months in Sydney, at Barloworld Coatings' Australian operations.

He manages to find time to tutor third year Masters students undertaking UNISA SBL's Online MBA Programme.

Wellington Matope

Immediate past president of IITPSA, Portfolio head: GTSS Foundational Infrastructure CBT Business Releases, Standard Bank

Wellington Matope was elected as the President of the Institute of IT Professionals SA in July 2014, following a stint as VP of the Institute under Rabelani Dagada.

As Portfolio head: GTSS Foundational Infrastructure CBT Business Releases at Standard Bank, Wellington is accountable for SAP Core Banking Transformation business releases.

Practical and hands-on, Wellington has successfully handled various roles in Southern Africa in the retail, insurance and risk management, ICT consulting and banking sectors.

Jane Steinacker

Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

Jane Steinacker began her career in media as a sub-editor at The Citizen newspaper in 2000. Following that, she was the editor of It's My Business in the Sunday Times, and has also been instrumental in the redesign of a few titles including It's My Business, Banker SA and Laowai (a consumer publication for foreigners in Shanghai). In addition, she has written extensively on monetary policy and penned a weekly tender column.

She has recently returned from Shanghai, where she spent three and a half years studying Mandarin at Jianguo University and Economics through UNISA. While in China, Steinacker also wrote for MoneyWeb.

Steinacker has been the editor of Brainstorm since October 2014.

Tshifhiwa Ramuthaga

CIO Financial Services Board and the 2014 Visionary CIO

Tshifhiwa Ramuthaga's career in the ICT industry spans 18 years. She is currently the CIO at the Financial Services Board, the regulator of the non-banking South African financial services sector. In this role she has brought in a customer-centric approach in terms of how the FSB delivers its regulatory business through ICT. She developed the organisation's ICT governance framework and strategy, which improved and stabilised the ICT environment in the organisation and allowed for more effective business continuity and partnership.

Under her watch, the FSB's engagement with various stakeholder groups was enhanced with the introduction of portals, eg, Solvency Assessment and Management (SAM) portal and Consumer Education portal, and automated stakeholder access for regulatory submissions. The ICT environment that she is in charge of is a crucial enabler to the FSB's vision to promote and maintain a sound financial investment environment in SA.

Ramuthaga is also currently the FSB's exco representative for the Committee of Insurance, Securities and Non-Banking Financial Authorities (CISNA), which forms part of the Trade, Industry, Finance and Investment Directorate with the Southern African Development Community.

Her career began at Statistics South Africa as a programmer, on graduation from the then Technikon Witwatersrand. She later joined Telkom and worked her way up until she was appointed senior manager, ICT at Telkom, the first black female to hold this position, at the age of 26. Her responsibilities included ICT system availability and SLAs for both Telkom internal systems and Telkom hosted services.

Her qualifications include an MBA degree from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, master's in IT from the University of Pretoria, and a B Tech degree (IT) from the then Technikon SA.