Telstra has continued its horror run of short-lived chief information officers, with incumbent CIO John McInerney having resigned after less than two years in the role, according to multiple reports.

iTNews appeared to have broken the story late this afternoon that McInerney – Telstra’s CIO since November 2008 — had resigned the position effective immediately after several months on leave. ITWire has also confirmed the news, although several Telstra spokespeople did not return calls late tonight.

McInerney’s deputy Ashley Lazaro — who has been acting in the role and notably took the CIO’s place at a recent Telstra press conference — would continue to act in the role until a replacement was found.

McInerney is just the latest in a long line of CIOs who have only lasted a few years in the top IT role at Telstra. Previously to winning the CIO role, the executive was the telco’s executive director of information technology, a position he had held since mid-2007. He has been with Telstra for about 7 years in total, after a prior career that included several years as the CEO of the Datum group – a company he spent nine years in total at.

Controversial Telstra transformation advisor Tom Lamming – who was brought into the telco by then-CEO Sol Trujillo – had led Telstra’s IT transformation and operations for several years before McInerney took the job.

Before that time, the last executive to formally hold the CIO title was Fiona Balfour, who left the top IT role at Qantas for the Telstra role, displacing incumbent Vish Padmanabhan in her turn.

Telstra’s longest-running CIO in recent history has been Jeff Smith — currently Suncorp chief information officer — who himself only helmed the telco’s IT operation for some three years.

Image credit: Telstra

Oh Dear.

Telstra chief information officer John McInerney today said the telco was making increasing use of cloud computing technologies to support the work of its internal staff.

But it doesn’t appear as if the nation’s largest telco will follow its much smaller cousin AAPT and go so far as to adopt Google’s cloud-based email and office suite across its operations.

In November 2009 AAPT revealed it would use Google Apps for its more than 1,300 staff, saying it was more of a philosophical decision than a technical one.

McInerney didn’t directly say that Telstra wouldn’t adopt Google’s technology for its staff when asked about the issue at a press conference held by the telco today – but he and Telstra chief technology officer Hugh Bradlow appeared to back away from the offering.

When he moved data into a public cloud offering, “I’ve got to be very very careful,” said McInerney. Bradlow then quipped – “If he imposes Google Docs on me, I’ll throw my laptop at him,” to laughter from the assembled press corps.

There is currently a sizable level of hype about other internal corporate communications tools such as Yammer, Sharepoint and Wikis. But McInerney said he still saw email as a key collaboration tool and would continue to build it out as an asset within Telstra.

In general, McInerney said Telstra workers were increasingly using cloud-based solutions – especially on the road with laptops connected to the telco’s Next G mobile broadband network. He gave the example of documentation stored online or development testing.

Asked what he thought about the argument that some less critical workers on the edges of organizations could be serviced with cloud computing offerings, McInerney said he would use commodity play infrastructure to support a “commodity play” situation.

The CIO said it was tough to get a definition of cloud computing – there were probably “30 definitions” out there, he said. “If I asked myself and Hugh about cloud computing, we would get a different definition. And we often do talk about that,” he said.

“Yes, but mine would be right,” joked Bradlow.

Telstra acting chief operations officer Michael Rocca backed the benefits that the company’s staff had obtained from using their laptops to do work on the road using Next G. “It’s been one of the biggest enablers of productivity improvement,” he said.

LTE trials
Also at the press conference, Telstra revealed some details of its ongoing plans to increase the robustness and speed of that mobile network.

In May the company will begin trials of the Long Term Evolution technology that is viewed as a long-term migration path for its current HSPA+ network. The company will partner with Ericsson, which built Next G, as well as Nokia Siemens Networks and Chinese challenger vendor Huawei on the trials, which will run for three to six months.

“LTE is globally acknowledged as the dominant next generation technology for mobile technology. It will be an important evolution for the Next G network in due course because it will give consumers access to higher speeds while giving Telstra the capacity to serve an increasing number of customers and support an even wider range of applications,” Rocca said.

Telstra’s executive director of wireless Mike Wright described LTE as “the ultimate technology” and said trials would take place using the Australian Communications and Media Authority-approved 2.6GHz spectrum and the 1.8GHz spectrum.

Telstra’s current roadmap has it upgrading Next G to theoretical speeds of 84Mbps through 2011 and 168Mbps in the 2012/2013 timeframe, through the implementation of the Multi-Carrier HSPA and MIMO technologies.

Image credit: Google