United Airlines Expands CIO’s Role: McFarland Resigns from Veterans Affairs

Nothing like a looming deadline to put the kibosh on posting new CIO job announcements on the blog.

With said deadline almost in my rearview mirror, I have the following news to share…

On Wednesday, United Airlines announced it had expanded its CIO’s role.  Garry Kelly (yes, that Garry Kelly, of Sears Roebuck fame, or infamy, depending on your perception of Sears) is now in charge of strategic sourcing, continuous improvement, industrial and process engineering and operations research—in addition to all his responsibilities as CIO, which included IT strategy, application development, technical operations, information security and infrastructure planning. It’s like a work bomb went off in Kelly’s office and left for fallout countless new responsibilities in its wake.   Actually, Kelly’s inheriting a lot of these duties from Rick Poulton, United’s SVP of strategic sourcing, who’s leaving the airline.  Gee, I wonder why?

Government Computer News (GCN) had a juicy story on Wednesday about the imminent resignation of Department of Veterans Affairs CIO Robert McFarland.  Good old GCN.  According to the story, McFarland is tired of dealing with the bureaucratic VA leaders, who’ve been dragging their heels on an IT reorganization he was hired to lead.  So he’s saying sayonara D.C. on April 30 and returning to retirement. Who wants to bang their head against on a wall when they could be on the fairways?  Power to you, Mr. McFarland.  And thanks for trying to improve things at the VA.