Microsoft Fires CIO Stuart Scott For Rules Breach

according to published reports

"We can confirm that Stuart Scott's employment with Microsoft has been terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

Microsoft General Manager Shahla Aly and Corporate Vice President Alain Crozier will assume Scott's responsibilities until a replacement is identified, according to the spokesperson.

Microsoft's confirmation, and the timing of Scott's departure, shows that the situation is different than the usual "wants to spend more time with the family" routine.

Last week at the InformationWeek 500 conference, in Tucson, Ariz., Scott and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner gave a joint presentation on the internal workings of Microsoft's IT department.

At the event, Scott cited a number of important achievements his group has made in the past two years, such as centralizing and consolidating Microsoft's IT operations, cutting its number of data centers from 26 to 5 and jettisoning about 1,000 unnecessary applications.

Scott, who reported to Turner, previously shared the CIO role with Ron Markezich, vice president of managed solutions. Last October, Scott become the sole CIO after Markezich moved into Microsoft's Servers and Tools division and took over the vendor's managed services efforts.

At Microsoft, Scott led an IT staff that oversees security, infrastructure, messaging and business applications and supports Microsoft product groups, corporate business groups, and the global sales and marketing organization. Scott and his team were also responsible for deploying prerelease versions of Microsoft software and gathering feedback to be rolled into products before their commercial release.

Scott, who joined Microsoft in July 2005, also spent 17 years in various positions at General Electric, including CIO of several divisions of the company.