Happened a few weeks ago, so not new news, but still quite humorous: Mr. Agile left Big Bleu after only a scant few years.
But certainly the biggest, or at least the strangest revelation is this nugget:
"Mr. Previn’s mother, the actor and activist Mia Farrow, announced the move on Twitter. Mr. Previn retweeted the post.
My son @FletcherPrevin is the new, youngest ever CIO of #IBM pic.twitter.com/DAIhm0saQX
— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) May 2, 2017"
I'm sure I'm not the only who wasn't aware that Big Bleu's new CIO is one of Mia Farrow's sons. An interesting connection for sure.
https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/05/03/ibm-chief-information-officer-jeff-smith-leaves-company/
Fletcher Previn has been named chief information officer at International Business Machines Corp.
He replaces CIO Jeff Smith, who “has decided to pursue other opportunities outside IBM,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email.
As a vice president inside IBM’s IT organization, Mr. Previn’s duties included “supporting over 600,000 laptops, 180,000 mobile devices, and the world’s largest deployment of Apple Macs,” according to his LinkedIn profile. He also oversees IBM’s intranet, internal mobile productivity applications and some desktop apps. Before joining IBM in 2006, Mr. Previn managed Walmart.com’s enterprise systems group, according to the profile.
Mr. Previn’s mother, the actor and activist Mia Farrow, announced the move on Twitter. Mr. Previn retweeted the post.
My son @FletcherPrevin is the new, youngest ever CIO of #IBM pic.twitter.com/DAIhm0saQX
— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) May 2, 2017
His appointment comes as IBM continues to try to offset declines in traditional businesses with sales in newer areas like cloud computing and its Watson artificial intelligence unit. The company recorded its 20th consecutive quarter of declining revenue and a 13% drop in quarterly profits when it reported earnings in April.
Mr. Smith joined IBM in the middle of 2014 with a desire to practice Agile software development and project management at scale. He oversaw a 20,000-person global IT group. “The mission is to have innovation and the speed of small companies … and see if we can do that at scale,” Mr. Smith told CIO Journal in 2015.
He previously was CEO of Suncorp Business Services, a unit of Australian financial company Suncorp Group. He led a technology transformation at Suncorp at the height of the financial crisis. IBM, a vendor, liked what it saw and brought Mr. Smith on board.
“Jeff’s mantra as CIO is creating an agile culture to drive fundamental change and material benefits for IBM,” says an executive bio for the upcoming MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. “Using the collective wisdom of IBMers to build a new model, Jeff’s organization is creating loosely coupled and tightly aligned teams that have end to end accountability to deliver business value at a pace vastly improved over what IBM has done in the past.”
He implemented an Agile-based structure in February 2015, replacing the old development and run groups with 25 new domains, each with its own leader.
Implementing Agile methods at scale meant more decision making by small, self-directed teams. “The challenge in a big company like this is that I have to abstract myself a bit more. I home in on leadership and culture and let them go solve problems,” he told CIO Journal in 2015.