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EDS Silent On New CEO's IT Consulting Past

Posted by timothy on from the rubber-chicken-circuit dept.

theodp writes "Slate reports on the press release issued by IT consulting giant EDS to announce new CEO Michael H. Jordan that curiously doesn't show Jordan to have any experience in the IT consulting field. In the late '90s, Jordan helped create IT consulting firm Luminant, took it public, and served as chairman of its board for 21 months. Luminant raised $80+ million from its IPO and paid $422 million to buy businesses as part of its pure-play roll-up strategy before filing Chapter 11 and having its assets sold for a mere $3 million. Slashdot readers may remember Luminant as the wacky workplace of My Fake Job, in which an ex-"Late Night" writer described 17 days he spent faking a job at the dot-com."

11 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. big dick brown by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As an EDS employee, I think anyone would be better than former CEO Big Dick Brown. Big Dick drove EDS into the ground. He was too busy building jets in the air, running squirrels, and herding cats to care about the business. The finical woes of EDS had nothing to do with the IT consulting, it had more to do with poor business decisions. He was canned board of directors and received a $35mil severance package. He has publicly stated that he needed the money because his wife has expensive tastes. What a load of crap.

    Jordan done good things at CBS and hopefully he can turn EDS around. The first thing he did was to bring Jeff Heller back. Jeff Heller was with EDS from 1968-2002. I'm sure his reason for leaving had something to do with Big Dick Brown.

  2. Fuck em... by Nezer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They laid me off in 2001. Management there as a whole is clueless (moreso than average). It was an *awful* enviornment entagled so deep in political wrangling it was a miracle we ever acomplished anything. Our customers hated us. The employees hated management. Management treated employees like shit. Everyone was afraid of getting canned so they could spend more money re-doing the christmas decorations at the corporate HQ in Plano.

    I once heard a Poli-Sci guy once say that a people gets the government it deserves. In this case I have to say a company gets the management it deserves.

    Now that Dick Brown is gone perhaps that book they gave me (written by one of Dick's proxies) might actually be worth something more than toilet paper.

    One good thing, perhaps all the lame emails from Dick would send out every month bragging about using the corporate jet to visit important clients in Hawaii (or some other equally exotic location) will finally come to an end.

    My group couldn't even order a pair of hard disks to monitor systems and this fucker is flying all over the world looking for more customers to screw.

    As far as I'm concerned... The fuckers deserve what they get.

    DISCLAIMER: I'm a bit bitter still so this view should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps my area was exceptionally bad.

  3. Why EDS Sucks by argoff · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IMHO, EDS is evil - stay away.

    At one large multi-national company I worked for, EDS made this cozy deal with high level managers - and our company signed a very long term IT outsorcing contract at a very expensive rate. Of course the contract stipulated that EDS would take over all IT services within the company.

    After my company was locked in, EDS proceeded to hire a large number of low wage McWorkers who were billed out at an extremely expensive rate as consultants. Of course, I doubt some could even figure out how to use a mouse, but that did not stop them from trying to run all the infrascructure and datacenters. It was truely an amazing sight.

    Thankfully, at the time - the dot.com boom was still going pretty strong so it didn't take much to quietly tip-toe out the door as the IT department fell into chaos. I'm still sorry for them to this day, poor souls.

    1. Re:Why EDS Sucks by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Happens everywhere, not just EDS.

      To offer a counterexample: I did work for a telco who had outsourced all their IT management, procurement and support to EDS. I was pleasantly surprised at how efficient these guys were running things. Everything from support to getting new software on your PC or a new PC itself was efficient and fast. The EDS guys worked with the comfidence that comes with experience. When we audited their operation, we found everything fully documented.

      If this is a representative example of how they work, I'd hire them anytime.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  4. un-iLuminant? by watchful.babbler · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Well, that's amusing -- I worked for one of the dot-coms purchased by Luminant; during the due diligence process, they told me roughly what they were ready to pay, and I told them they were insane -- we had lackluster management, overstaffed departments, a poor sales record, and our clients were hiring away our own programmers and project managers to take their sites in-house. And yet they bought us anyway, with predictably dismal results.

    To me, combining that kind of incisive decisionmaking with the geniuses at EDS who allowed the geeks-gone-wild environment of Chaos2Order to flourish ("Mister accountant dude, you know what we need? A car! In our ninth-floor office! And we need, like, a crane to get it in here!") means that I should either dump my stock, or offer to let them buy my consulting business.

    --
    "Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
  5. Nah... by Jonathan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a basketball player named Michael Jordan? I would have thought that the ./ crowd would be fans of yet a third Michael Jordan, the well known machine learning researcher

  6. How can it be worse? by Seahawk91 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am on the pointy end of the NMCI stick as one of the first 30,000 of the supposed 350,000 seats that EDS is supposed to roll out for the government. The contract is three years behind schedule (hey, it was a four year contract) and Congress recently approved them for two more years (I guess they were doing a really good job). The contract costs my boss $4,000 a year to rent (yes, rent)a 900 MHZ Dell Laptop. But, without that rental, we will no longer be able to communicate with the rest of the organization. If I want to upgrade to a CD burner or heavens forbid a DVD player, they are an extra $350 a year to rent..each. That is OK since I have to have NMCI tech support install the drivers at $150 a tech support call. Oh that is right, EDS is cash strapped. Apparently $8 billion to roll out 350,000 1998 Dells is just not enough. When will the madness end?

    1. Re:How can it be worse? by Seahawk91 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Every seat rolled out gets a payoff. In fact, I have payed for two of my sub-contractors even though they do not have NMCI seats. I am told that we will get the money back when we initiate the final claim against EDS. So, you have at least $8000 that you have not yet (if ever) earned.

      Let's move on to a small detail of the contract...you must remove equipment currently onsite. We pay you to do this. However, something that just arrived on this base was a $6 Million dollar PBX Cisco router that you just removed. I do not blame EDS, I blame the fool that wrote the contract...don't worry, they received bonuses also. They left the current router in place and, as if by magic, we still have the same quality phone service as before NMCI was here.

      Final note, the latest practices of these theives is that they are not even updating the hardware. They take legacy machines (600 MHZ and below that were already in place), update the operating system to Win 2K and give them back. Wow, $4K lease for Win2K now. Don't tell Microsoft, they may get jealous and raise the prices of Win2003.

  7. I wish EDS luck. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wish EDS better luck than past Jordan companies.

    I used to work for a company known as Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Mike H. Jordan came to us from Pepsico after previous CEO's nearly bankrupted us through incompetence, but at least it was well intentioned incompetence (lost 4 Billion USD in bad Florida real estate).

    Jordan didn't know anything about Westinghouse either, other than we had Group W broadcasting. That would be the start of his media empire that he appearantly wanted to build.

    Short version: Mike comes in as Westinghouse CEO, buys CBS, Westinghouse changes name to CBS. CBS sells off all non communications assets. Viacom buys CBS and Jordan goes elsewhere.

    All during this time, Jordan and his buddies pay themselves royally while killing a company that while a bit down in the dumps, could have survived. I'm sure George Westinghouse and Nikola Telsa are still rolling in their graves.

    It sounds like after that, he destroyed another company, Luminate. I'm sure he got paid real well for that one also.

    I give EDS 3 years or less.

  8. EDS sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As a civilian employee of the Navy, I can attest to the fact that EDS "IT consultants" are a bunch of know-nothing crooks. They were given a huge contract to create a network for the Navy/Marine Corps (NMCI) and have done nothing but screw it up. People can't do any development on it (and we are a research lab), it doesnt work with ERP software, and it routinely loses or outright deletes people's mail or mailboxes. The only explanation people in the trenches have of this sorry mess is that there were huge kickbacks somewhere between the DoD/Navy and EDS.

  9. If you've worked with the government, you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ...should already know that kickbacks and log-rolling are quite common with Defense contracts.

    For example, there's another boondoggle going on with the "mult-year" SAP implementation within the Navy. Why does the Navy need KPMG to implement SAP, when they could work directly with the company? Which leads to another question - wtf are we spending our defense dollars on a FOREIGN-OWNED ERP SYSTEM to help manage our national defense?

    Last time I checked the news, the German public aren't too fond of us right now.