GM’s IT transformation is being spearheaded by Randy Mott, who took on the role of chiefinformation officer at the company in February 2012, after leading IT strategy at Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Wal-Mart Stores. Mott is known as an IT leader “with the ability to work with leadership teams,” according to JohnParkinson, affiliate partner at Chicago-based Waterstone Management Group, an advisory firm focused on serving the technology sector.
Extensive outsourcing can inhibit the ability of IT to contribute to the performance of a large company, as it places the IT function at a distance from decision-makers. “Bringing those jobs back inside GM means they can control the quality of the people and put them where they want them,” Parkinson said in an interview with ThomasNet News. “You can morph them into a workforce that knows about automobiles and that knows GM.”
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This insourcing strategy won’t necessarily work for any company, Parkinson cautioned, but GM is large enough that the economics are right. “It works because they have the scale to enforce standardization and consolidation as a route to automation,” he said.
Although bringing IT back inside the organization is a challenge, what's driving the move is Mott's (pictured below) longtime operating philosophy and the benefits he expects to reap from a strategic IT function. “You have to have sufficient vision and alignment of purpose between the CIO and the business leadership teams,” said Parkinson. “Any CIO can learn to mouth the words, and most have,” said Parkinson, “but many don’t really understand how to make the words real in the business.”
Following Mott’s hiring, GM announced that 3,000 HP employees, previously working on GM’s IT operations under an outsourcing contract, would be moved over to GM’s payroll. The automaker said the move will take it “from a highly outsourced to a largely insourced business model,” reversing a three-decade-old trend. At the same time, the company would be consolidating data centers, standardizing software, and centralizing IT management, along with “changing the mix” of IT employees so that more of them would be focused on innovation rather than simply operations. The transformation was originally projected to take between three and five years to complete, but reports indicate that the initiative is moving faster than anticipated.
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