Johnny Barnes

Mr. Barnes is a retired IBM Vice President and CTO with over 40 years of IBM service in a variety of strategy, product, solution development, system architecture, management, and executive positions.  Mr. Barnes was one of IBM’s top executives.  He was appointed to several IBM corporate staff positions, including several critical IBM strategy, product, and manufacturing task forces that established the foundation of IBM's business and technical transformation. He was a critical high-level manager and leader of IBM’s mid-range and high-performance RISC-based products which reestablished IBM’s industry leadership.  

Mr. Barnes led the re-engineering of IBM’s internal hardware development, global computing, and telephony environments.  He also grew IBM’s Manufacturing, Financial, Communication, and Public Sector services businesses.  Mr. Barnes has an overall perspective of the computer industry and its applicability to business segments, as well as computing strategies and advanced technologies to meet emerging distributed computing, business, and manufacturing future needs.    

Mr. Barnes’ professional experience includes several years of business and technical management of products, customer solution offerings and contracts and IBM worldwide organizations.  He was responsible for the definition of IBM's Manufacturing Industries' Worldwide Technical Strategy and the development of key components of the strategy. As a Director Mr. Barnes was responsible for transforming IBM's worldwide hardware and systems development strategy in support of IBM’s re-engineered business process, Integrated Product Development (IPD).  

As Vice President he was responsible for transforming IBM’s global infrastructure to a premier e-business computing and VOIP telephony environment.   As the Vice President and Deputy CIO, Mr. Barnes was responsible for IBM’s worldwide information technology environment and advanced technology deployment within IBM.   As the Vice President and CTO of IBM's Public Sector, he was responsible for transforming a troubled strategic government agency infrastructure program into a success and integration of advance technology solutions into multiple agencies. Mr. Barnes’ management responsibilities included business management, strategy, architecture, design, development and deployment of both IBM and customer business solutions utilizing advance technologies and standards.    

Mr. Barnes is recognized worldwide as an accomplished executive computer industry leader and technologist.  In his career with IBM, he received 8 patents, 3 IBM invention achievement awards, several IBM informal, divisional, and corporate awards for his technical and management contributions to IBM. Mr. Barnes has numerous publications on a wide variety of technical areas.  He was recognized nationally by NIST DOD Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support (CALS), the National Eagle Leadership Institute (NELI), and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE).  NSBE awarded Mr. Barnes the Black Engineer of the Year award in 2011.  Mr. Barnes holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston and attended graduate school at the University of Texas concentrating on software engineering and manufacturing automation.  He is Project Management (PMP®) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) V3 certified.   Currently, as the owner of an IT consulting and services company, Mr. Barnes provides leadership and consulting to companies and government agencies globally.  In addition, he was a director on the board of SCRA Advanced Technology International and STEM Premier (Chairman).