Mercedes-Benz is filling a new central position in the form of IT management. CEO Ola Källenius (54) informed the 10,000 IT employees about the change in management in an internal email on Tuesday, as the “Handelsblatt” reports.
Jan Brecht (52), the previous Chief Information Officer, will be leaving the company at the end of April. The manager is looking for a new challenge at his own request. Källenius regretted Brecht’s decision and emphasized that the decision was based on personal reasons.
Driving digital change
Brecht will be replaced by manager Katrin Lehmann (45), who previously looked after IT in sales and marketing as well as in various software hubs of the vehicle manufacturer. According to Källenius, she will play a “crucial role” in driving the company’s digital transformation forward.
The manager will have to cope with many tasks. Because: Electric vehicles are not arriving. The top model in particular flopped; the electric S-Class called EQS is sold at high discounts, as manager magazine reported.
The cars of the future are also a concern. They will be more expensive than planned and will be finished later, The new operating system MB.OS will initially only go on sale in a slimmed-down version
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Higher demands on IT
Most of the data that the new models generate is transferred to the cloud. This leads to higher demands on IT and rising costs.
The planned MB.EA-L vehicle architecture, the basis for a new electric luxury era, has been announced by Källenius for 2027. It will be at least a year later, they say at headquarters.
Lehmann studied business administration in Mannheim and spent most of her career at SAP, including in the role of Chief Data Officer.