EDS Silent On New CEO's IT Consulting Past

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."

Comments

from baseball to basketball to IT

[Anonymous Coward]

After a failed career as a member of the Chicago White Sox minor league team...and a lackluster return to the NBA, I suppose he now had some divine inspiration to try his hand at IT Consulting?

Should've stayed retired, man.

Another proof

[niom]

That a high profile failure is better than a low profile success, at least in the management world. I can't understand it, but then again I'm just a lowly engineer.

ITS A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

[Syncroswitch]

You dont need IT experiance to lead or start in that position, your not doing the grunt work in a firm that size. you hire experts to handle the IT and consulting part. His job was to assemble the crew, and steer the ship (into the rocks...). It dosent seem to me to need to be listed as IT consulting background. rather as executive experiance. the skills you need there are sneakiness, a lack of morals, and an absence of ethics classes. I think he has already demonstrated those skills quite well. I wish him good luck, as I make a note to keep his connections out of my portfolio...

Couldn't be worse than Dick

[Ars-Fartsica]

The previous CEO was gutting the business, gutting employee moral, and gutting the share price.

Lou Gerstner wasn't a tech guy either and he saved IBM.

Understandable

[dodgyville]

We all have things in our past we don't like to talk about.
For me, it was the period in the early nineties when I wore
silver parachute pants and hypercolour t-shirts.

How can it be worse?

[Seahawk91]

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?

Re:Why EDS Sucks

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.