Former EDS CFO Daley retires

Electronic Data Systems’ former chief financial officer and currently a vice president has decided to retire, the latest exit of a member of the now dismantled executive team that led EDS between 1999 and early 2003.

Jim Daley, who joined EDS in March 1999 as CFO and switched over in February 2003 to be vice president of client solutions, global sales and marketing, will retire from the IT services giant on July 31, EDS announced Wednesday.

Daley, 62, was hired by former chairman and chief executive officer Dick Brown. Brown resigned from EDS in March 2003, after the company ran into a variety of serious problems in the last year or so of his tenure. Those problems included a still ongoing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, disappointing sales and a steep fall in the company’s stock price.

EDS’ new top executive team is led by Chairman and CEO Michael Jordan, who was brought in to replace Brown, and by Jeffrey Heller, who had retired from EDS in 2002 after 34 years with the company and was brought back as president and chief operating officer.

Jordan and his team outlined a restructuring of the company last month in a meeting with financial analysts that calls for a reduction in costs, a streamlining of operations, a refocusing on outsourcing services and laying off about 2 percent of the global workforce, or about 2,760 employees.

Heller, who had held the president and COO posts between 1996 and 2000, will take over Daley’s job on an interim basis. Robert Swan stepped in as CFO after Daley left that post in February of this year.

EDS, in Plano, Texas, is the world’s second largest provider of IT services.