Reaching Beyond IT Yields GM Role

A few months ago, I posted a blog about Hunter Jones, CIO of Cameron International, a $9B oil and gas equipment manufacturer, who had added VP of Enterprise Services to his CIO title. “Sometimes I say that my new role is everything the CEO doesn’t want to do,” said Jones. But more seriously:  Jones’s new functional responsibility included, in addition to IT, product R&D, global supply chain, security, corporate quality and leadership over a major transformation project. His team of 600 had increased to 1400.

A few weeks ago, I learned that Hunter Jones was recently promoted to a new role of Vice President and General Manager of Drilling Systems at Cameron. This is a classic example of what I call “Reach Beyond IT” where a CIO uses the considerable operations skills he develops as CIO and takes on additional functional roles.  Do this long enough, and if all goes well, the CIO, like Jones, winds up with his own P&L.

In more exciting developments, Kim Hammonds joined Deutsche Bank on November 25 as CIO and global co-head of group technology and operations (GTO). Previously, Hammonds was CIO at Boeing and held various roles at Dell and Ford Motor Company.

On that note, Boeing named Ted Colbert as CIO and Vice President of IT. Colbert, who was formerly vice president of the Boeing Information Technology Infrastructure organization, replaces Kim Hammonds. Colbert will report to John Tracy, CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering, Operations & Technology. Colbert joined Boeing in 2009 as a director of the Enterprise Network Services organization

Michael Gibbs was promoted to Head of IT at BP after the departure of former CIO Dana Deasy last month. Gibbs has been with the energy giant since 2008 and was promoted from his role as CIO and Vice President of Refining and Marketing. Prior to BP, Gibbs was a business unit CIO at ConocoPhillips.

Charles Balawajder joins US Steel as Vice President and CIO and will have a seat on the company’s executive management team.  Balawajder will report to the CFO, David B. Burritt and succeeds David H. Lohr, who will retire from the company on Nov. 30. Balawajder previously served as Vice President, IT and CIO at UTC Climate, Controls, and Security (CCS), a $ 17 billion division of United Technologies Corporation.

Pearson announced the appointment of Albert Hitchcock as CIO and a new member of the Pearson Executive team. Hitchock joins from Vodafone, where he served as CIO since 2007. The 28-year IT veteran also previously held leadership roles at BAE Systems, Racal Electronics and Nortel Networks.

I ran into Marilyn Smith a few weeks ago, who tells me that is joining George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, as CIO.  Previously, Smith was the head of IT at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining MIT in 2009, Smith was the president of Life Companies at the Hanover Insurance Group.

Bloomberg appointed Koray Oncel as CIO. Oncel has been with Bloomberg since 1998, starting out as a Multimedia Software Developer, then to Director of Product Development and then to Managing Editor of  Product Development & News Technology.

That’s it for this week!  Best of luck to all of these new CIOs.

Martha