MEET THE TEAM
Gary Hardy
Managing Director [CBRM, COBIT2019, CGEIT]
Gary is the founder and owner of IT Winners. He has always been passionate about enabling business leaders to deliver value from technology. He also believes in “true consulting and education” i.e. enabling clients to improve performance by facilitating adoption and implementation of new capabilities. Affectionately known as “Mr COBIT” (Gary is one of the 3 creators of the COBIT framework), Gary now spends his time developing Leadership courses for our new eLearning library – Executive Education Online
Marc Morley
Operations Director
Marcs background is in Accounting and Treasury, but in 2012 he yielded to his desire to experience life and work outside of the UK. He moved to Cape Town and joined ITWinners – a team of people with the same passion for making a difference. Marc relishes change, problem solving and forging lasting relationships. In 2023 Marc accepted an offer to also lead the Training arm of the Good Governance Academy – founded by King Report author Professor Mervyn King
Our reputation speaks for itself, we are known as trusted advisors, and we’re proud that each of our Associates conduct their business with the same level of integrity and passion. We all regard our clients as business partners.
Baziel Barends, CBRM [Cape Town, South Africa]
Baz is the founder of Radishweed Consulting, a company focused on sustainable business and digital transformation. He was previously an IT executive for TFG – a large South African retailer, with leadership responsibilities over twenty years. During this time he managed the Project Management Office, Group Business Analysis, IT Call centres, Store Operations Systems, End User Computing and most recently the IT Business Relationship Management function.
Baz has an MBA from UCT which focused on Leadership-as-Practice, and coaches executives on the EMBA program on systemic leadership and organizational viability
Baz is also lead member of BRM Institute Relationshipism team and serves on the Boards of BRM institute, and their chapter (world’s first) in South Africa.
Email: baz@radishweed.com or visit: www.radishweed.com
Carolynn Chalmers CBRM, CGEIT [Cape Town, South Africa]
Carolynn is best known for her successes in leading large, complex, strategic interventions – she attributes this success to the application of good governance principles. Carolynn is a Corporate Governance advisor, specialising in the areas of IT and Information Governance. Carolynn has extensive management and governance experience and has held various Board and Executive roles for international, listed and unlisted organisations.
Carolynn holds an MSc from the University of Cape Town; is an IT Governance facilitator for the Institute of Directors; is a member of the IITPSA’s Western Cape committee; is certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), and is a certified Business Relationship Management BRMP® trainer.
For more information contact carolynn.chalmers@itwinners.com or visit: www.candorgovernance.com
Hayden Williams BRMP [Cape Town, South Africa]
Hayden is focused on delivering customer value founded on the diverse business and systems knowledge and experience internationally established in a predominantly ICT focused career spanning more than 30 years. He was an Executive CIO for a multi-national company responsible for SA and the African region.
Hayden is passionate in the ability of a business or individual to manage and harness change. Effective Leadership, a solid Governance foundation and Trust are the fundamentals of successful change/growth initiatives.
His value proposition is based on a mature insight and understanding of the dynamics of leadership, stakeholder management, strategy alignment and process optimisation at both the executive and operational levels of business. He is an accredited PMP with considerable program and project management experience.
For more information contact hayden.williams@itwinners.com
Jeremy Byrne, CBRM (Trainer) [Loughborough, England]
Jeremy is a passionate strategic business focused IT business relationship manager, striving for stakeholder satisfaction through strategic service delivery alignment, continual service improvement and innovation. He has built on both his business and technical skill sets, becoming a well-rounded strategically focused manager.
His Masters qualification in Management and Leadership in Higher Education, helped improve his knowledge of University strategy and business functions – enabling him to apply theory to his business relationship management and ITIL service management skills.
Jeremy excels at converting complex stakeholder requirements, from a variety of business unit types, into long term strategies, projects or service improvement plans. He utilises business analysis and business process reengineering skills from within the IT department to ensure successful value delivery
John Thorp [Vancouver, Canada]
John’s passion revolves around helping individuals, enterprises and society realise the value of information technology‐enabled change. In today’s age of digital exploration, realising this value requires going beyond frameworks and methodologies – it will require a fundamental mindset shift around organisational leadership and governance.
John is an internationally recognised leader in the field of value and benefits management with over 50 years of experience in the information management field, including technical, management and executive positions. He has addressed and advised leaders of some of the world’s largest enterprises.
Author of “The Information Paradox”, John also led the development of the ITGI’s Val IT™ Framework, is a member APM UK’s Benefits Management SIG, ISO’s working group on Corporate Governance of IT, and the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) working group on Business Value Management. He is a Fujitsu Consulting Fellow, a Fellow of IVI, and of the Institute for Digital Transformation.
For more information visit: www.thorpnet.com
Louis Stanford BRMP [Cape Town, South Africa]
Louis is a service management expert and strategic systems thinker, concerned with addressing the underlying reasons why IT finds it so difficult to articulate and deliver their full potential value to the business. He is focused on helping enterprises realise value from their IT investments, through effective adoption of good management practice. He is passionate about helping people think differently about the work they do, and helping them to achieve very different results through a careful and practical application of theoretical principles.
Louis is accredited in ITIL, COBIT and BRMP and is considered one of the leading ITIL trainers in Africa.
For more information visit: www.serviceflow.co.za
Lucas Mogashoa [Johannesburg, South Africa]
Lucas is passionate about showing the value that IT can add to business strategies. As a former CIO Lucas recognised the importance of stakeholder relationships and effective governance in the delivery of business value and management of risk. He became one of the few people with a significant IT leadership background to take on an executive role for IT governance and information security advising the Board of the FirstRand Group.
Lucas’s 30+ years experience has been in several industries of the private sector, as well as a strategic role at SITA (State IT Agency). He has worked at all levels from operational IT up to CIO, engaging at all levels including on Board committees. He is most passionate about forging good relationships with stakeholders, as that simplifies engagements and the delivery of value from initiatives. He enjoys passing on his experience and enabling change by mentoring individuals.
Dr. Mariana Carroll PhD, CISA [London, England]
Mariana is an enthusiastic technology advisor and academic. She has a passion for consulting and training services and solutions around Emerging Technologies. She consults on projects for start-ups, medium and large organisations across the globe, advising on cutting-edge research, insights and solutions with a strong focus on Africa.
Mariana built her professional career on the belief that knowledge and transformation are the two fundamental building blocks of any successful organisation and strives to add value to people by helping them excel at work. During her tenure at Deloitte, she launched and steered the Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence, as well as a research and eminence unit called Deloitte TechSights Africa. Mariana currently facilitates the CIO Transition Labs at Deloitte South Africa.
For more information: www.marianacarroll.com
Nicole Ramjee
[Johannesburg, South Africa]
Nicole is the founding Director of HR Synthesis, a Human Resources (HR) business that was established in 2009. She comes from an HR Generalist background with expertise in Strategy Development, HR Operations, Compliance & Governance, B-BBEE, Business Transformation, Change Management and Coaching.
Nicole fosters collaboration, innovation and the creation of high performance teams that drive sustainable change in organisations. Nicole leads our PeopleProductive assessments and workshops
Miguel Cockburn, CBRM (Trainer) [Lima, Peru]
A Regional Director of Information Technology with more than 25 years of vast international and local experience, in local and multinational companies with proven results in strategic planning, process and business optimization and implementation of innovative technological solutions to achieve business objectives. He has a specialization in Digital Transformation and has worked in business solutions with worldwide scope.
Founder and CEO of MACK Innovaciones Tecnológicas, he has provided diverse consulting services for different industries locally and internationally. He is an active member of the BRM Institute, and became a member of the Knowledge Team Council of the BRM Institute in 2019. His passion is to help companies to succeed, by implementing best practices such as BRM, and helping them to manage their transformation journey.
Peter Harrison [Sydney, Australia]
Peter is a leading global consultant in Value Management. He has worked with scores of organisations to bring an outcomes and value focus to their portfolio of projects and programs to realise the business value of their digitally enabled and transformation investments. He helps organisations move their culture and introduce capabilities beyond just ‘project delivery’ to the achievement of business value from their digital investments.
He works with executives at an enterprise level firstly to educate, then to establish and optimise the value management disciplines of value governance, portfolio management and benefits realisation.
Peter was a member of ISACA’s COBIT 5 Task Force, Val IT Steering, and contributor to the bestselling book The Information Paradox – Realising the Business Benefits of Information Technology authored by John Thorp (DMR Consulting).
For more information visit: www.valuemanagementconsulting.com
Robert Payne BRMP, CGEIT [Cape Town, South Africa]
Robert has a passion for the formulation and execution of enterprise strategy and the integration and alignment of IT with enterprise strategy, designed to deliver optimal value to his clients through active participation in their business processes.
Robert has fifteen years of management experience in a variety of industries and organizations where his responsibilities included general management, IT management (up to CIO level), GIS management and project management.
Robert also has over ten years of specialist consulting experience, predominantly in the areas of corporate strategy, performance management and IT governance. He has been an active IT governance practitioner, and participated in the development of COBIT 4.1® through COBIT 5®. He also contributed to the production of licensed training material for COBIT 4.1® and COBIT 5® and has delivered IT governance training to many students.
Robert is a B.Sc. Eng. (Civil), MBL, CGEIT and BRMP®
For more information contact rob.payne@itwinners.com or visit www.lode-star.co.za
Steph Vermeulen [Johannesburg, South Africa]
Steph inspires people to develop a healthy appetite for what she terms the exhilarating disruptive revolution. Three times published, she has been a leading pioneer in the field of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) for two decades and her boundless energy makes her an acclaimed speaker and facilitator. Steph takes her responsibility seriously to keep up-to-date with inspiring breakthroughs about the human brain and – even though her work is rooted in science – she emphasises the practical application of Personal Intelligence (EQ + IQ).
Steph was one of the first practitioners to introduce the practical application of EQ into her seminars in 1996 and her bestselling book – EQ: Emotional Intelligence for Everyone – followed in 1999. She is an entrepreneur who develops material for both business and public applications
For more information visit http://www.eqsa.co.za/
Winston Hayden [Cape Town, South Africa]
Winston is a recognized industry leader in Information Technology Governance, and Cybersecurity. Winston has over 20 years hands-on experience in the IT industry, across various sectors. He is a former Executive and President of ISACA South and has contributed towards various IT governance publications, most notably the King III Report of Corporate Governance, and the COBIT5 and COBIT2019 Governance Frameworks.
Winston has also been a member of the South African National Standards ISO Development Workgroup for IT Governance (ISO-38500) and IT Service Management (ISO-20000). He now provides executive advisory and management consulting specializing in Cybersecurity.