Toni is in the running for an award on the evening of 15 November.
Toni Serra, CIO of AECI, has been nominated for the inaugural CIO Awards. Toni is an experienced IT executive with more than 30 years of experience in the IT industry.
He spent the majority of his career in IT working in the manufacturing industry with companies such as Nampak, where he was CIO for 14 years, and most recently, with JSE listed AECI, a South African chemicals and mining explosives producer. Prior to that, he served as the group IT manager at Cadbury Schweppes SA (formerly Cadbury), a British multinational confectionery company.
Toni has been praised by his peers for his forward-thinking approach, strategic mindset, approachability and commitment to knowledge-sharing. His biggest strengths lie in IT strategy, IT management, enterprise resource planning, and business strategy.
Toni is a huge supporter of the CIO South Africa and several roundtable discussions and was recently a panellist at a CIO South Africa Year-End function in November last year, where he shared insights on talent mobility, a talent management development strategy, and the future of work. According to Toni, “IT professionals of the future need to be business people who can speak IT. That’s not to say that technical skills are no longer important, but rather that the business-minded IT person is very important going into the future.”
He believes that individuals aspiring to succeed in the future should be equipped to take on significant roles such as becoming the next finance director (FD), senior manager in procurement departments, or another senior executive. This ability stems from their capacity to comprehend and align IT with the broader business objectives.
The process for the CIO Awards involves a comprehensive and rigorous evaluation, inspired by the success of the CFO Awards that launched in 2014. Judges meticulously assess each nominee based on their dossier and conduct in-depth two-hour interviews to highlight their achievements and excellence in various aspects of IT leadership.
