CIO Announcements from GM and Kraton Polymers

Plus: Former GMAC CIO Joins IT Consultancy, and more 

On the heels of yesterday’s announcement from Ford that its CIO, Marv Adams, is leaving to take a job with Citigroup comes similar news from GM.  Maryann Goebel, the CIO of General Motors North America, has left GM for the CIO post at DHL. Goebel had been named CIO of GM North America in 2003 after serving as CIO of GM Europe.  The beleaguered auto-maker appointed Clarence Ogletree acting CIO.  Ogletree currently also serves as regional services information officer. 

In other GM-related news, a former CIO of GMAC took a job with IT consultancy Statera.  Chris Laping joined the Englewood, Colo.-based company earlier this week as the principal in charge of Statera’s financial services practice.  

Allan Sommer joined Kraton Polymers as its CIO on March 20.  He most recently worked for Texas Petrochemicals as its CIO, a position he held for a year.  Previously, Sommer spent three years with JPMorgan Chase and served as Enron’s vice president of corporate information systems.

Workforce optimization software provider Witness Systems (name sounds more appropriate for a security software company) hired Greg Higham as its new vice president of information systems and technology. Higham most recently worked for Epiphany (remember that vendor? Weren’t they back in the day e.piphany? The company is now owned by SSA Global) as the CRM software provider’s vice president of worldwide customer services.