Boeta Pretorius is the Chief Director of IT at the North-West University. He services more than 64000 students on three campuses, 300kms apart and 63 learning centres spread across South Africa. The NWU came into being on 1 January 2004 as part of the transformation of the HE landscape. The NWU is going through a restructuring again and the IT department has now grown to a staff compliment of 190 with three new direct responsibilities namely electronic services, library information systems and audio/visual.

He started his career as a junior lecturer in Computer Science, but soon moved to the then Computer Services department as a programmer. He was appointed as Manager of one of the divisions and became director of Academic Solutions a few years ago. Boeta has a passion to drive IT towards enabling the core business of the university and position IT as a strategic partner to realise the success model of the NWU.

He holds a MSc Computer Science degree from the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. In his personal life he is a keen athlete and still does the Iron Man competition at a senior age.