Microsoft this afternoon announced Jim DuBois as the company’s chief information officer.

DuBois had served as the interim CIO for the past six months and replaced Tony Scott, who left after five years with the company to be CIO of VMWare.

DuBois, a 20-year Microsoft vet, will run, secure and maintain Microsoft’s internal systems. Microsoft’s IT department plays an important role as the first customer of the company’s business groups — rolling out new products for use and testing across the company, prior to public release, in a process commonly known as “dogfooding.”

However, DuBois may have a somewhat different role than in the past. Rob Helm, research director at the independent Directions on Microsoft research firm, told us in June that “customer-facing services like Office 365 play a much bigger role testing new products now, making ‘dogfooding’ less critical than it was.”

DuBois, who previously served as general manager of IT and vice president of Microsoft Products and Services IT, will officially be Microsoft’s CIO on Jan. 1 of next year and will report to Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer.

“Jim has demonstrated outstanding leadership in managing our IT organization through the transition period while continuing to position IT as a strategic asset and growth lever for Microsoft. I am confident that, as CIO, he will continue to deliver world-class IT infrastructure and innovation for Microsoft,” Turner said in a news release.