Perpetual dumps CIO after Fujitsu outsourcing

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sacked

blog Those of you following Delimiter back in August 2012 may recall that Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu made rather a big deal at the time about a new five year IT infrastructure and applications outsourcing deal which it had signed at the time with financial services giant Perpetual. Well, it appears that the outsourcing arrangement has gone well — so well, it appears, that Perpetual no longer believes it needs its chief information officer, Jenny Levy, who led the outsourcing effort and only took the role in January 2012. FST Media reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“Jenny Levy, CIO at Perpetual has confirmed her role has been made redundant … Perpetual has combined its IT and operations function into the new role – General Manager, Information Technology – which will report to the Chief Financial Officer, a spokesperson confirmed.”

Now it doesn’t appear as if Levy’s too unhappy about the situation, and it also appears as though the executive has had several shortish roles over the past several years after a long-lived career at Westpac. We can’t blame the CIO for wanting a more diverse career — a decade inside Westpac’s IT division would be enough to send anyone loopy, from some of the stories we’ve heard over the years — but we have to note this isn’t a particularly good look for Perpetual. You don’t typically make executives redundant just after they’ve successfully delivered a major body of work for you. This kind of behaviour isn’t likely to have the effect of attracting other quality staff into your workforce.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Good luck Perpetual in your future recruitment. First you sack Australian’s and send the jobs offshore. then you sack the agent of your cause. Sounds very cutthroat and un Australian.

    I wont be using your services!

  2. … to solve a problem than address the symptoms rather than the cause.

    Soon they will have to solve the problems the outsourcing causes too.

    In the meantime, the supporting data becomes dirtier, the systems more integrated and tightly coupled and maintaining it more expensive. After sending all the data to the cloud to deal with the infrastructure costs Fujitsu markup and pass on, and all their private data has been made accessible by mistakes and constant change (stupidity) if they are still in business they will decide to re-develop. The cheapest way to do that will be to have the developers in-house again, as well as managing infrastructure, for security reasons. This is probably the only way an ignorant, lazy management team focusing on their own wealth more than their customers can have their wants, needs and aspirations decoded, and so begins the cycle all over again- at an even higher threshold of costs.

    All the banks have cycled like this in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Boards retire, Corporations really don’t change, and history repeats itself.

  3. Seems shortsighted to me. It’s surprising to hear when a company of Perpetual’s size doesn’t feel IT is important.

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