International Council
Dr Pieter van der Walt is based in South Africa and has extensive experience in the area data privacy and information governance, particularly on legislative developments and guiding frameworks, such as POPIA/PAIA, GDPR, King IV and <IR>. Pieter’s objective is to harmonise existing business processes with information governance frameworks, thereby mitigating risk and identifying sustainable value-enhancing opportunities for the organisation.
Currently, Pieter is the acting information officer (Data Privacy Officer), part of the data privacy programme implementation team and drives the data governance framework wand privacy framework within Discovery Ltd - an integrated global financial services organisation, specializing in health insurance, life assurance, wellness, investments and savings products, short-term insurance and banking products. Previously, he was the team lead for the data migration team as part of Dimension Data’s (now NTT Ltd) S2A (Simplify to Accelerate) programme for migration all global operations onto a standardised global template for DD Americas in Charlotte, NC, USA. Aligning to global data governance requirements, but also to align with global business processes. Prior to this, Pieter was the Information Officer within the Altron group where he was involved in establishing data governance policies across the group for POPIA & GDPR working closely with the group’s Governance, Risk, Compliance and IT functions. Managing the annual reporting process for non-financial information reporting within Corporate Governance requirements, as defined in GRI, <IR> and King IV.
Pieter holds a Doctorate from the University of Johannesburg (D.Litt et Phil) in Information Science. His research addressed the concept of “information architecture” as a way of visualising and describing the information assets and interaction of these assets within the organisation. The research provides definitions of information and contextualises the information audit and information model as key tool for the information manager in establishing the information architecture. Peter is a certified MDMQ – ISO 8000 Master Data Quality Manager and holds a Masters in Information Science and a Masters of Science in Management of Technology and Innovation.
