General Motors past IT experience was a far cry away from smooth operations in the 1980s and 1990s. The blunders and clashes between GM and its outsourced IT department, Electronic Data Systems Corp., are well documented.
Today, things are much different, and Automotive News spoke with Randy Mott, GM’s global chief information officer, to understand how far IT has come at one of the United States’ largest automakers. Foremost, he said the entire operation is “way different,” and recalled EDS’ doings with GM.
“Although [EDS] were in-house, they were still operating as a third party inside of GM.” EDS, more often than not, often implemented its work to simply run the business and hardly executed ways to increase efficiency. Before Mott arrived at GM from Hewlett-Packard, Â 90 percent of GM’s IT work was outsourced.
“We’re still playing catch-up on the investment that we’ve made as a company in IT,” Mott said. “Now we’re closing that gap quickly … but it still takes time.” Former CEO Dan Akerson formerly said outsourcing GM’s IT operations was one of the automaker’s biggest mistakes. He likened it to outsourcing another country to operate the U.S. Marines inside of the U.S. Armed Forces.
With current GM CEO Mary Barra at the helm, Mott has started over with a clean slate and continues to work utmost efficiency.
Comments
GM has to change their marketing advertising . don’t they see other commercials –lets talk about important features not about a ( cake ) Buick– . Lets mention fun to drive –good mileage –great quality & style –great braking –COME ON YOU CAN DO BETTER
Mott is conveniently forgetting the real issue was with the gm IT. Like rest of gm suppliers an adversarial relationship was the norm. You had to stay in the contract. Purpose was to cut not improve. Any ideas to improve efficiency were lost in gm contracts teams. Business units had to work through gm it for any new ideas. They did not bother and created shadow it everywhere.
The 5th generation outsourcing model from gm was a massive failure. That caused many of issues that gm complaimed about. The high level execs from that period inside gm are still having a hard time with emplyment.
Mott is no star. He was fired from, you guessed it, HP. His claim to fame was consolidating data centers. Internal data centers. Not a hugely forward thinking role.
Funny akerson said that, when he was with att he tried to convince companies to outsource network operations to att. The more I have read about him the more I think mary should have had role earlier.