Dive Brief:
- Nissan Motor Co. hired Anthony Thomas, former CIO of GE Global, as its CIO, according to The Wall Street Journal. Thomas will continue the company's adoption of modern digital tools.
- Thomas' predecessor, Celso Guitoko, moved the automobile company to the cloud, led a tech standardization plan and created transparency around IT investment strategies for senior management.
- Thomas joins the ranks of other former GE technology executives who have left the company to lead digital strategies at other organizations, such as former GE Power CIO Clay Johnson, former COO Vince Campisi and former CIO of GE Capital Martha Poulter, reports the Journal. GE's own former CIO, Jamie Miller, will begin as GE's CFO in November, according to the Journal.
Dive Insight:
Nissan has not made many tech headlines outside of it being hit by the WannaCry cyberattack in May, but the automobile industry is one of the most recent to begin making a splash in advanced tech like the cloud and Big Data. Toyota Racing Development announced an "all-in" partnership with AWS in September to bring analytics and machine learning to the race track.
GE experienced a lot of executive turnover since October began, from board changes to a new CEO and now CIO. The company remains in the midst of its own digital transformation, and bringing in fresh faces and ideas may be key to overcoming snags in the transformation. Tech executives certainly seem to have no problems translating their skills to new industries undergoing digital transformation.
Jim Fowler, CIO of GE, has his work cut out for him as the company doubles down on digital applications and cloud services. The company is currently completing the transition of its industrial services to Microsoft Azure, and announced AWS would be the preferred provider for core IT applications in early October.
