Kristina Alvendal was appointed Vice Mayor of Stockholm responsible for Housing and Integration last year. She is Member of the Stockholm City Council for the Moderate Party and President of two of Stockholm's fully-owned housing companies. She is Chairman of the Police Board in Stockholm County Police Authority. Among other assignments she is the spokesperson for issues of equal opportunity for the Moderate Party. Kristina Alvendal has been involved in Stockholm's politics since 1991, e.g. as President of the fully-owned housing company Stockholmshem and as Chairman of Vantör's District Council. Up to last year's election she has been employed in managing positions at different private companies.
Nomhle Canca
Chief Executive of South Africa’s Blue IQ company
Nomhle Canca is the CEO of Blue IQ Investment Holdings, a company owned by the province of Gauteng. The company invests in infrastructure development to stimulate economic activities by the private sector. She also sits on the Boards of a number of listed companies in South Africa. Raised in the US where she lived in exile with her parents, she obtained her BA in Economics and Political Science from Emory University in Atlanta in 1987 and worked as a Stock Broker before returning to South Africa in 1991. Upon her return, she spent three years at Anglo American Corporation before becoming executive director of Womens’ Investment Portfolio Holdings (Wiphold), the first listed women’s empowerment group in South African History. She has served on the Katz Tax Commission and was a founding member of both the Women’s Development Bank (WDB) 1991-1995 and Wiphold (1994-2002).
Wim Elfrink
Cisco Chief Globalisation Office and Executive Vice President
Wim Elfrink has two roles at Cisco as Chief Globalisation Officer he is leading the next stage of the Cisco globalisation strategy and as Executive Vice President, Cisco Services, he is responsible for Cisco Services worldwide. In line with the first role he relocated to Bangalore, India in January 2007 and set up Cisco HQ East. Mr Elfrink joined Cisco in 1997.
Jan Figel
European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth
Jan Figel became European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth in 2004. He was born in Vranov nad Topl'ou in Slovakia and was a research scientist before entering politics. He was a member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic from 1990 to 1998 when he became State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He played a leading role in Slovakia's accession negotiations with the European Union. He returned to the National Council in 2002 where he chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee before stepping down in 2004 to take up his Commission post. From 1995 to 2000 he lectured in international relations at Trnava University.
Peter Gruetter
Former Secretary General of the Swiss Finance Department
Peter Gruetter is a director and distinguished fellow of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. Until March 2007, he was secretary general of the Swiss Federal Department of Finance, responsible for planning and controlling, communications, resources and legal service. He chaired the IT Council of the Swiss Confederation, and led the Federal Strategy Unit for Information Technology; the Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems, and Telecommunication; the Federal Office of Personnel; and the Federal Office for Buildings and Logistics. For more then 10 years, he has chaired the Board of the Swiss Society of Administrative Sciences.
Riccardo Illy
President of the Italian Region of Fruili-Venezia-Guilia
Riccardo Illy is President of the Italian region of Fruili-Venezi-Guilia and in 2004 was also elected President of the Assembly of European Regions. He started work in his family's coffee-making firm in 1977 and contributed to the company's success by reorganising its internal business structure as well as the structures of the firms it controls. He was Business Director then CEO and at present is Vice President of the company. Mr Illy was twice elected Mayor of Trieste, the town of his birth and entered the Italian Parliament in 2001. He became President of the region of Fruili-Venezi-Guilia in 2003.
Harald Lemke
German State of Hesse State Secretary and CIO
Harald Lemke became State Secretary in the German State of Hesse in 2003. He is responsible for IT and e-government matters and is currently the only CIO in Germany’s public administration at cabinet level. After training in computer studies, he started his career as a software engineer with Digital Equipment. He subsequently worked for Nixdorf Computer AG, the City of Hamburg and IBM. He returned to the public sector as IT manager for the Hamburg police department and radically reorganised the department’s IT infrastructure. He then moved to the Federal Criminal Police Office where he was head of IT.
Yvon Le Roux is the Vice President responsible for Public Sector in Cisco's European Markets theatre. He has headed the public sector team since May 2003, having joined Cisco as the Vice President responsible for southern Europe and Africa in 1996. Prior to Cisco he held a number of senior positions at IT companies, spanning several territories. His career began at Sperry Computer Systems before he moved to Matra Informatique as President in 1984.
Jos Luhukay
Indonesian National ICT Council Member
Jos Luhukay’s educational background is in electrical engineering and computer science. After completing a PhD and being a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, he returned to Jakarta to help start a school of Computer Science at the University of Indonesia. He left the university in 1989 to join Bank Niaga as Vice President of Information Technology. In 1995 he joined Bahana Pembinaan Usaha Indonesia, a government owned investment bank as COO. After that, he helped form the Capital Market Society of Indonesia, where he served as Executive Director until 1997. In September 1997 Dr Luhukay was recruited by the Government of Indonesia to serve as COO of the Jakarta Initiative Task Force, a unit set up to help mediate private sector debt restructuring. He was subsequently General Secretary of the National Committee for Corporate Governance.
Rajeeva Ratna Shah
Indian Planning Commission Member Secretary
Rajeeva Shah is Member Secretary of India's Planning Commission, a position equivalent in rank to Minister. He has previously been Secretary in the Department of Information Technology where he was responsible for a number of highly successful projects such as the IT for Education programme, IT for the masses, IT for Health etc. He also has a background in broadcasting, having been CEO of the Public Broadcasting Corporation of India. He has held many other senior government positions including: Secretary of the Planning Commission; Secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion; Secretary of Disaster Management in the Cabinet Secretariat; and Trade Commissioner /Regional Director for India's Trade Development in North & South Americas. At the State Government level, he has served as Principal Home Secretary, Principal Power Secretary and as Secretary to the Chief Minister.
Preston Jay Waite
Deputy Director of the US Census Bureau
Preston Jay Waite, a career U.S. government employee, became Deputy Director on February 1 2007. He also serves as the Chief Operating Officer of the Bureau. In 2010, he will oversee the decennial census, the nation’s largest peacetime mobilization -- with more than 500,000 temporary workers and a budget exceeding $11 billion. A native of Utah, Waite began his Census Bureau career in 1971 after earning a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science at Utah State University. He became Assistant Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Decennial Census in 1997, and was part of the team that delivered Census 2000. Waite is the visionary and architect of the 2010 reengineered census. Using hand-held computers for data collection, a major expansion of technology, will dramatically change the way censuses will be conducted for decades to come. Waite has authored and/or co-authored more than a dozen papers in professional journals and publications.
Ian Watmore
Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills
Ian Watmore became Permanent Secretary for the UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in June 2007. Prior to that, he was the head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, the Government’s Chief Information Officer, and the first head of the Government Information Technology profession. He joined the Civil Service in September 2004 after a twenty-four-year business career in IT, culminating as Accenture’s UK Managing Director from 2000 to 2004. He has a degree in mathematics and management studies from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is on the board of the English Institute for Sport, spent five years on the Board of eSkills UK, the sector skills council for IT and telecoms, and is a former member of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, and Business in the Community. In 2005 he received the computing industry’s Outstanding Contribution to UK IT award.
Dave Weinberger is a U.S. technologist and writer. He is best known as the co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a website and eventually book about the transformational impact of the internet on business. He has since written two other major books on the internet - Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and Everything is Miscellaneous. He is a philosopher by training and once worked a gag-writer for the comic strip "Inside Woody Allen". He has also been a marketing consultant and executive at several high-tech companies, and currently serves as a fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He was Senior Internet Advisor to Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.
