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General Motors To Slash Outsourcing In IT Overhaul
gManZboy writes "GM's new CIO Randy Mott plans to bring nearly all IT work in-house as one piece of a sweeping IT overhaul. It's a high-risk strategy that's similar to what Mott drove at Hewlett-Packard. Today, about 90% of GM's IT services, from running data centers to writing applications, are provided by outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro, and only 10% are done by GM employees. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years--to 90% GM staff, 10% outsourcers. This will require a hiring binge. Mott's larger IT transformation plan doesn't emphasize budget cuts but centers on delivering more value from IT, much faster--at a time when the world's No. 2 automaker (Toyota is now No. 1) is still climbing out of bankruptcy protection and a $50 billion government bailout."
Uh...: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#Top_vehicle_manufacturing_groups_.3Cby_volume.3E (which does put Toyota #1 and GM #2)
If you had bothered to read the article you copy-pasted that from, "Volkswagen has retained its place as the number one car company in the world, according to the Forbes Global 2000 companies survey.
The report ranks the world’s biggest companies across an equal weighting of sales, profits, assets and market value. The result is a company ranking in order of size, with 66 countries represented in the mix." (http://news.drive.com.au/drive/motor-news/rankings-worlds-biggest-car-companies-20120420-1xc14.html)
Think of the brands VW owns versus the brands that GM owns.
> Smart, smart move by GM, who I do not often credit with making many.
Don't forget the history here. GM used to own EDS, and it pretty much functioned as their internal IT org.
And I had many friends look them over, even going so far as to interview, just to test the waters. They'd pay high, but you had to shave all facial hair off and dress exactly as their code dictated. After a probationary period they cut those they didn't see fitting in - which meant you ended up with a bunch of conformists who wouldn't take a risk, by pointing out something may not have been a good idea or there was a weakness in a plan somewhere. Good ol' Ross Perot - run a company like the army.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Michigan is roughly as big as the U.K., maybe that will bring some perspective.
Good-bye
Let's start with all the stuff you missed:
-As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border. )
-Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side
-During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down. The cutoff was where the grids switched over in either Flint of Jackson. We were back online a little faster than most places, but we were down for 24+ hours.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
No they're not. VW are crushing everybody at the moment, in terms of units sold:
http://www.economist.com/node/21558269
Does anyone really believe that the tens of billions of dollars that the govt gave to GM actually fixed the problem? Their cost's are still too high relative to the competition. and there are a lot of people that will never purchase another GM product while the Govt has any stake in the company. I was only half kidding about the 3 years. Europe is heading into another recession (or worse). China is slowing down and the US economy stinks (and may get a lot worse if things in the rest of the world go to shit.) An IT re-org is nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs.
I gave up buying GM products a long time ago despite my family being diehard Cadillac and Oldsmobile owners when I was growing up. Frankly, it was all about quality, long before gubmint had a stake in the company. They have probably fixed the quality problem by now, but I'll never find out. There have been one or two cars they've made in the last twenty years that I was a bit interested in, but never enough to give up my American made Toyotas and Hondas.
And despite me not buying their cars, GM still manages to be the number one automobile producer in the world. I have no doubt that when push comes to shove, GM will figure out how to sell Volts.
+1 for you, sir or ma'am, from an unfortunate employee of a company whose IT infrastructure and support have been outsourced to HP. Coming up on one week of waiting for them to pull out their thumbs and either (a) restore our admin access to a server so we can get it unwedged, or (b) log on themselves and issue the ONE FUCKING COMMAND that will unwedge it for us and that we have REPEATEDLY provided TO them.
General Dynamics also dropped the EDS clowns a few years ago and went back to a full complement of in-house staff, after they got hit for the second time with a major infestation of spyware.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I worked for a while in state government. The IT department had established metrics for all products and services. If the Treasury department wanted a new PC (and the associated management, imaging, desktop support, etc) there was a fixed cost for that, and the Treasury department paid IT for the services it performed. This has a lot of administrative overhead, but it means that "IT" isn't a cost, they actually generate revenue. It forces the consumers of IT to justify their expenses. IT is in a terrible position having to describe why we spent XX amount of money on this particular system, or why we own this many PCs. They ought to be involved in finding out, but the users of the technology need to be involved and need to justify their own use of technology, and aid in making decisions about necessity.