IBM’s former chief information officer, Jeff Smith, has joined ANZ’s International Technology and Digital Business Advisory Panel.
The bank announced the appointment of the IT exec today. Smith joined IBM in 2014 and departed earlier this month (Smith was replaced by Fletcher Previn at IBM). Smith was also previously a CIO at Suncorp and from November 2001 to April 2005 was in charge of IT at Telstra.
“Jeff’s appointment to the panel adds another experienced voice as we continue to improve our customers’ experience through ANZ’s digital transformation,” ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott said in a statement.
“We need to deliver this transformation at a much faster pace through new ways of working, so Jeff’s leadership in technology roles and his experience of implementing an Agile culture make him a valuable inclusion to the panel.”
Smith was responsible for rolling out Agile across IBM, ANZ said. The bank announced earlier this month that it planned to roll out Agile ways of working across its workforce, with ANZ already employing Agile methodologies for around a fifth of its tech projects.
“We need to break with some of the traditional 20th century approaches to organising and working to ensure we are more responsive to 21st century customer expectations,” Elliott said at the time.
“Moving to implement the agile approach at scale in our business is an important evolution in how we run ANZ which will allow us to respond much more quickly to customer needs, create higher staff engagement and make further improvements in efficiency.”
The bank announced the creation of its tech advisory panel in August 2015. Its inaugural members were Twitter Asia and Latin America's managing director for online sales, Aliza Knox; former PayPal exec Don Kingsborough; former Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini; and then Dimension Data exec Gerard Florian.
Florian later left Dimension Data and joined the bank as group executive technology as part of an executive reshuffle that saw the departure of former ANZ CIO Scott Collary.