Judges

Tertiary ICT Excellence Award Judges

Anne Taylor

Anne leads Microsoft’s Education business in New Zealand and is responsible for implementing the company’s vision to empower students and educators to achieve more. She works closely with academic institutions, government, partners and educators to enable the education transformation across the country. Over the past 18 years with the company she has held various marketing and business management roles, and now works with a team of committed individuals dedicated to implementing key programs and strategies which align with key education initiatives in New Zealand. Throughout her career she has prioritised mentoring people and gets immense joy from this. Anne is also a mother of two young men and a loving partner to Denny. They are a close family and enjoy spending time together, which whenever possible is in the beautiful Coromandel where her happy place is relaxing and watching the world go by as the boys all fish.

Graham Pohl

Graham has been a technology consultant and architect in education, finance, central and local government sectors for the last 20 years.
He enjoys breaking up monolithic systems, and building cultures that foster high cadence technical excellence.
He is old enough to have worked with assembler, COBOL and minicomputers and wise enough not to want to go back.

Christina Mackenzie

An experienced digital strategist and business development leader, Christina instills trust, creativity and collaboration across every engagement. An influencer on the Waikato tech scene, Christina leads with digital strategy in creating sustainable businesses that have been transformative for her clients, employers and NGO partners.

With over 10 years experience driving business change and rapid growth, Christina has represented brands like Amazon, and is currently spear heading go to market with NZ’s #1 in cloud (IaaS) companies, The Instillery.

Her key achievements include founding a disruptive services division inside one of New Zealand’s top systems integrators that increased annuity revenue 18x and delivered 60% year-over-year growth. She also founded Agile Meet-Up Hamilton, a hub for lively tech discussion now with over 200 members.