Keynote speakers

Christophe Makni is the Data & Automation Head at Migros Bank, Zurich, Switzerland. He is a passionate Lean Agile Coach & Digital Leader. He leverages his business experience (10 years manufacturing, 12 years financial services) and the different best practice frameworks he mastered to apply them in the best possible and pragmatic way.

He coaches and develops managers into leaders (using e.g. cognitive psychology and daily routines). He deploys a culture of experimenting and reflecting at the workplace to be as innovative as possible.

As a leader, he practices servant leadership and enable innovation and problem solving capabilities through daily coaching. Currently, he is leading an agile and digital transformation of a large shared service as well as working on different AI initiatives.

He enjoys teaching his students about all the good practices he gathered in his 22 years of business experience in industry.

Josef Langerman is the Head of the Centre for Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the same university. Before joining academia, he was an information technology executive with experience across the airline, retail, and the banking industries. He focuses on large scale IT organizational transformations that use DevOps and Agile approaches alongside the cultural changes that enable them. His teaching and research specialties are IT management, Digital Humanities and Applied Data Science.

Tony van der Linden is the Chief Information Officer and head of research and development at Barone, Budge and Dominick (BBD), a software development business with close to four decades of experience building enterprise-scale digital business solutions. In addition to his CIO responsibilities, his duties include directing the research and development strategy for BBD. Tony’s professional experience includes leading the development, support and maintenance of several enterprise-scale solutions across domains such as financial services and logistics, where he actively took part in building solutions such as trading, time and attendance, telephone management, logistics, fuel management, procurement, and asset management systems. Tony holds a Master of Engineering (MEng) as well as a Master of Science in Engineering (MSc. Eng) from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), is a senior member of the IEEE (SMIEEE) and a professional member of the IITPSA where he holds the grade of Professional CIO (Pr.CIO). 

Nhlanhla Lucky Nkosi is a qualified Game Designer and Software Engineer with experience in building and maintaining enterprise banking software. He has extensive experience working in .Net as well as a barrage of web technologies. He currently leads the Research and Development Unit of BBD Software Development.  He considers himself a change agent. He firmly believes that technology is a tool we should use to bring about positive change and he tries to put this belief into everything he does.