In this episode, Duncan McLeod interviews Len de Villiers, until recently group chief information officer at Telkom, to talk about the role of IT management in South Africa.
In a wide-ranging discussion, De Villiers talks about his career as a CIO for many of South Africans top companies, including Nedbank, First National Bank, Absa, Transaction Capital and, of course, Telkom.
He discusses how the role of the CIO has changed over the decades, the biggest challenges facing IT leadership today and what those interested in pursuing career in the field should be considering.
What is the role of a CIO today? What are the top things a good CIO brings to an organisation? What do good CIOs do inside their organisations to help the business, and what are some of the mistakes they often make? De Villiers covers all this ground — and more.
In the discussion, De Villiers, who chairs the CIO Council of South Africa, talks about the big overhaul he led of Telkom’s IT systems, why it was done and what it involved.
He also talks about what it takes to be a CIO and whether South African universities are adequately preparing youngsters for careers in IT.
It’s a great discussion. Don’t miss it!
How to subscribe to TechCentral’s podcasts
There are many ways to enjoy TechCentral’s podcasts, beyond simply streaming them from our website. A good way is by subscribing to them using an app on your phone, allowing you to listen in the car, at the gym or wherever you happen to be.
The TechCentral Podcast RSS feed is available via iono.fm. Note that this is a separate feed to the weekly TalkCentral podcast, the RSS for which is available here. If you’d like both podcasts in one RSS feed, that’s here.
Use the RSS feeds to subscribe to either podcast (or both podcasts) in your favourite reader (we recommend Pocket Casts for Android, iOS and Windows Phone — look for “TechCentral” in its search engine to find both shows).
We are also available through iTunes. Simply open the iTunes app on your iPhone and search for “TechCentral” to find the two podcasts.
TechCentral podcasts are governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. This means you may copy and redistribute the material unmodified, but you must provide the appropriate credit to TechCentral, with a link to this page. We also ask that if you’d like to use this podcast on your website or in an electronic newsletter that you use iono.fm’s embedded player. The HTML for this episode’s embedded player is:
<iframe src=”https://embed.iono.fm/epi/569473″ width=”100%” height=”135″ frameborder=”0″><a href=”https://iono.fm/e/569473″>Content hosted by iono.fm</a></iframe>
