IBM's chief digital officer Bob Lord says the company is changing its 'mindset' so it can appeal to startups and developers

When Bob Lord announced he was leaving AOL in November last year, most people knew he was going to end up landing a big new role -- not least because he told The Wall Street Journal he wanted to run a public company or a company about to IPO. Lord spent more than a decade at ad agencies, ending up as global CEO at Publicis Groupe's digital technology division, presiding over almost 8,000 employees and 1.8 billion in revenue. In 2013, he left agency land to join AOL as its president, helping to grow revenue from 1.5 billion to more than 3 billion. Verizon, one of AOL's large clients, became so impressed with its programmatic advertising offering that it ended up acquiring the company for 4.4 billion in June last year. Lord is now at IBM, in the newly-created chief digital officer role. Lord hasn't quite replaced Ginni Rometty to run the company, but he has been charged with transforming "Big Blue" into a much slicker operation that he hopes will appeal as much to Silicon Valley techies as its traditional enterprise customers.