Panel of Judges

The judges for the CIO Awards are extremely experienced in the field of business and finance and are highly regarded by the CIO community. The panel consist of industry leaders working for South Africa's leading universities, banks, advisory, IT and law firms, as well as formeR awards winners.

Find out more about the judging process.

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Judging process

Interviews
Before the end of August 2023, CIO South Africa will interview all nominated CIOs to get a clear picture of his or her drive, motivation, vision and results. Each of which will be conducted online by one or two judges and a senior representative of our editorial team. The reports of these interviews will be added to the dossier of each CIO and will be used by the judges to determine their individual votes.

The goal of the interview is to get insight into the CIO’s involvement in the overall success of the company and the way he or she has distinguished himself or herself. To help structure the interview, and to make sure we address the same issues in each interview, we have created a set of interview questions as a guideline.

Each CIO has to answer three basic questions in the following categories:

• Strategy & Leadership
• Digital Innovation
• Smart Data
• IT projects
• Cybersecurity
• High-performance Team

There are no specific sets of questions for the overall categories Public Sector/Young CIO of the Year. The votes for the specific categories will be tallied to determine who wins the Public Sector, Young & CIO of the Year Award.

Dossier
For each nominee our editorial staff will create a CIO dossier. This CIO dossier contains the interview and a full profile description of the nominee. The CIO dossiers will give a good general impression and overview of the accomplishments of the nominees. It can be used to determine your votes. We will distribute the CIO dossiers via email or if you prefer via Google Docs.

Your votes please
At the end of September, we will send a dossier of the shortlisted nominees to the panel of judges with a scorecard. Judges will be asked to score each CIO on the short list on a scale from 1 to 10 in the category they are eligible for, which will be clearly indicated on the scorecard. By adding up all the points we determine the winner for each award category. 

Showcasing diversity in the CIO Awards
As the CIO Awards is intended to showcase the diversity of talent in the IT Executive space, the number of category wins is limited to two per individual nominee.  Which two category awards are won is determined by the following rules in this order:

1. Outright wins (as opposed to ties),
2. Greatest difference in score with the next best scoring person,
3. Tie break rules apply when needed to determine the winner.

What happens in the case of a tie?
In case of a tie in one of the award categories, the nominee who receives the highest score in the CIO of the Year vote wins the award in that category. If there is still a tie, the nominee who scores highest in most of the four compulsory categories wins. If there is still a tie, the judges will be asked to vote for one of the tied nominees in a second round.

Integrity of the awards
Integrity and ethical conduct are crucial assets of good leaders. CIO Award winners need to be role models and shining lights of excellence. For this reason, CIO South Africa reserves the right to publicly suspend or revoke CIO Awards. This will happen, in consultation with the panel of judges, if information about a CIO Awards winner becomes available that is damaging to the stature and integrity of the CIO Awards.

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