Dive Brief:
- The Walt Disney Company named Diane Jurgens CIO, the company announced Friday. Jurgens' will start on Oct. 5 and report to SVP and CFO Christine McCarthy.
- Jurgens comes to Disney from BHP, a mining, metals and energy company headquartered in Australia. The executive served as CTO at BHP from 2015 to 2020, and previously held leadership positions at General Motors and Boeing.
- In her new role, Jurgens will head Disney's global enterprise tech organization, "including enterprise business systems, infrastructure, workforce enablement, and enterprise resilience engineering," according to the announcement. She will succeed Susan O'Day, who retired in January after 12 years as Disney's EVP and CIO, according to LinkedIn.
Dive Insight:
Jurgens brings global insight to the CIO role as the company grapples with the financial toll of the pandemic.
"Most of our businesses were shut down, and this had a huge impact on our third quarter results," said CEO Bob Chapek, speaking during the company's Q3 2020 earnings call in August. The company reported $11.7 billion in revenue in its Q3 2020 earnings call, compared to $20.2 billion in the same quarter last year, or a 42% year-over-year decrease.
Leading Disney IT means grappling with issues of distributed technology at scale. The company has 223,000 employees, according to the latest SEC filing, with part of that workforce continuing to operate remotely. Content streamed through its direct-to-consumer services, including products, such as Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+, reached 100 million paid subscriptions.
As the pandemic continues to hinder in-person activities such as movie theater and theme park attendance, the company's leadership have focused on Disney+.
"We've continued to build on the incredible success of Disney+ as we grow our global direct-to-consumer businesses," said Chapek, who became CEO in February and succeeded long-time CEO Bob Iger.
The company plans to expand the streaming service globally. First launched in the U.S. and four other countries, the company's technology platform will need to scale to support projected expansions to Europe, Latin America and territories of Asia-Pacific through 2021
