Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.

Tony Scott, who most recently was CIO at Walt Disney, will take over that same role at Microsoft in February, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. Scott, who also will be a corporate vice president at Microsoft, replaces Stuart Scott, who departed the company in November. The two are not related.

Scott will manage Microsoft's 4,000-person IT organization, which is responsible for all of the technology systems supporting the company's worldwide sales, marketing and services operations, as well as the enterprise systems and applications for all corporate processes.

At Disney, where he was senior vice president in addition to CIO, Scott was the first CIO to manage the entire company's IT systems, according to Microsoft. Prior to Disney, Scott was CTO at General Motors and vice president of operations at Bristol-Meyers Squibb.

There are a lot of new faces in the ranks of upper management at Microsoft, with a rash of them signing on to the company in the last six months. Just last week Microsoft revealed that company veteran Jeff Raikes, president of its Business Division, will leave the company in September. The company tapped an outside executive -- former Juniper Networks, Macromedia and Adobe executive Stephen Elop -- to fill that role.

Other new hires to the company since last July include: Dan Reed, Microsoft Research director of scalable and multi-core computing in November; Robert Youngjohns, president of North American sales and marketing and corporate vice president in November; Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group in August; and Don Mattick, senior vice president, Interactive Entertainment Business in July.

There is likely more new blood to come as Microsoft also confirmed last week several other executive departures -- Bruce Jaffe, corporate vice president of corporate development; Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy; and Rob Short, corporate vice president of the Windows Core Technology group.

Apart from CEO Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, many of the company's other top executives have joined the company in the past three years. They include the man widely seen as Gates' successor, Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, and Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Group, also joined the company that year.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.