As CIO and vice-principal of ICT Unisa, Mathabo Nakene-Mginqi has led one of Africa’s largest universities through a high stakes digital stabilisation and cloud transformation journey. Her path to the executive role, shaped by an unexpected chapter in interior decor, reveals a technology leader focused on intentional, human-centred systems change.
There is a detail about Unisa CIO and vice-principal of ICT Mathabo Nakene-Mginqi has that stops people mid-conversation. Her interior decor qualification and former career as an interior decorator continues to surprise those who meet her in a professional context for the first time.
It is not the answer anyone expects from the woman who stabilised one of Africa's largest universities, introduced multi-factor authentication to a student population of over 375,000, and took home the Public Sector CIO of the Year award at the 2025 CIO Awards.
But perhaps it should not surprise anyone at all. Interior decoration, like technology leadership, is fundamentally about understanding a space, seeing what is broken, and making deliberate decisions about how to transform it into something that works. During a sabbatical mid-career, she set up an interior decorating business and ran it for several years before returning to IT.
“You cannot decorate without understanding how people live and it is the same with systems. If you do not understand how people work, you cannot design anything that lasts,” she explains.
When Mathabo joined Unisa, the institution had just lost over 100 teaching hours in a single month because the system was down. Students could not access their coursework and academics were rescheduling their work around system availability, operating on the hope that the platform would actually be there when they needed it. She set out to make the learning management system (LMS) invisible in the best possible sense when she took on the role.
Discipline around communication key
“My goal when I first joined was to get us to a point where we don’t even consider whether the LMS will be available or not. I wanted our academics and students to focus on the business of why they are there, which is teaching, learning, research, community engagement and commercialisation.”
The impact of the lost teaching hours was quite significant on the distance learning institution, which graduates over 37 percent of all graduates produced in South Africa annually. The scale of the university means that the technology is not just a support function – it is a core enabler of the university.
The platform in question was Moodle, recently migrated to as Unisa moved away from Sakai. The investment had been made before Mathabo arrived, and some voices in the institution were beginning to suggest the university should revert to what it knew.
She held firm and saw the May and June 2022 examinations through on the new system and saved the university an estimated R26 million in the process.
“We’d already made that investment and were not going to see the return on the investment unless we went through with it. The toughest challenge was pushing for this continuation and the change management that came with it.”
Part of what made the change management effort effective was discipline around communication. She identified which stakeholders were compulsory engagements and which were influential but not formally required. Both categories required a plan.
Managing infrastructure critical
“If you’re not bringing them along on the journey, you’re not going to win. It was important for academics to know that we were working on fixing the system problem and to gain confidence in ICT,” she says.
Before migrating to a new cloud platform, Mathabo had already moved the university’s LMS from below 95 percent availability to 99.93 percent. Unisa has since migrated from Azure to Amazon Web Services, a decision she describes as deliberate and evidence-based.
To get there, she built what she calls an infrastructure capability development and management model to govern how Unisa manages cloud infrastructure, defines roles and responsibilities, establishes SLAs and builds internal capability over time.
“Any LMS operating on an insignificant load will work but once you operate at the scale that Unisa does, the infrastructure you host it on and how you manage that infrastructure is just as critical as the application itself,” she says thoughtfully.
Innovation with intention
Beginning her career in software engineering, Mathabo described herself as a delivery expert at her core who is passionate about problem-solving and innovation. She shares a moment during her journey at the institution where she realised she resisted creating a fully dedicated innovation team for far longer than she should have.
The decision to separate the innovation team finally came after reading a book by digital transformation strategist David L. Rogers, whose argument that innovation teams must have their own people, distinct from the run-and-operate business, landed with some force.
“The ways of work in the operational technology business were cannibalising the new ways of work I was building in the innovation business,” she explains reflectively. “I had to eat a slice of humble pie and go back to my exco and tell them the innovation team must have their own people, after they had been telling me exactly that.”
The dedicated team is now a reality. The pipeline it is running includes drone-as-a-service, which is already operational and will be used by the university's physical security and communications teams, a blockchain-based certificate storage platform and a structured AI experimentation programme built around a roadmap developed in partnership with the academic community.
“We have a sandbox where we play around with ideas and identify use cases that will scale and make sense within the broader university,” she says, explaining the role of the innovation team.
A different kind of budget story
One of the less visible but more telling indicators of cultural change at Unisa is the ICT budget spend rate. When Mathabo arrived, the portfolio was spending approximately 35 percent of its annual allocation and returning the rest unspent. She moved that number to 80 percent.
“We’ve moved from a culture of receiving a budget and returning it unspent to a culture of accountability. The question now is: what have we done with it, and if we are asking for more next year, how confident are we that we’ll spend it?” she says.
The shift matters because trust and budget are linked. Finance needs to see a track record before it will allocate at the level that innovation requires.
“Our new goal is to spend at least 90 percent of the budget to drive innovation and experimentation that provides alternative revenue streams for the university. In the public sector, we are all aware of the challenge in the fiscus for funding higher education. ICT has a seat at the table and needs to be creating the opportunities to bring in revenue,” she adds.
Building for what comes next
In addition to her executive and family responsibilities, Mathabo has registered for a PhD in IT with a focus on platform ecosystems. She reads widely across various disciplines and describes reading as both a professional discipline and a way to stay mentally fit.
“If you’re not on top of the game, you’re already behind. Reading gives you a perspective of what other people are doing. It may be a different sector, but it is transferable and keeps you abreast of the latest trends,” she adds.
She is still in the middle of the story she is building at Unisa – and she is patient about that.
“The improvements in Unisa ICT are not by osmosis. They are by design and intentionality. I wholeheartedly believe in getting the small details right, and the big things will follow,” she concludes.
