Slashdot Mirror
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."
In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
Familiarity with how your business operates
Longer term institutional memory
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.
They should be done with hiring right around the time they file for bankruptcy again.
It's been about 5 years or so since all IT was outsourced.
We're right on time for managers to start the in-house cycle again.
Good luck in the next 5 years and see you all again on the jobmarket in 2017!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Not sure how you are measuring size but:
"Volkswagen has retained its place as the number one car company in the world, according to the Forbes Global 2000 companies survey."
"US poster boy General Motors came in seventh position among the car makers"
Forbes’ top car makers for 2012
Volkswagen – 17
Toyota – 25
Daimler – 37
Ford – 44
Honda – 59
BMW – 61
General Motors – 63
I presume that Slash Outsourcing is Slashdot's latest unwanted "channel" to go with that Business Intelligence nonsense?
I'm thinking specifically about the MyVolt site. Ok, it's mostly a bunch of ads and info on the Volt - obviously mainly motivated by brain-dead marketing, since it's also the main place owners go to check their car's status.
So, you push the log in button. Though there's room on the page, oh no, we have to pop up a window to log in on - meanwhile, the animations on the page behind are still loading and running blocking code that makes my other web apps stutter. After maybe 10 seconds, you get the log on window, with it all filled in (thanks firefox) and click the log in button....and you wait, and wait, and wait. Meanwhile, the button you clicked doesn't grey or disable, and clicking it again breaks it. Finally, you're logged in and it starts trying to talk to the car to see what the state of charge is for you. This takes at least two minutes, often ending in "we failed to contact the car, try again?". During those two minutes, it's busy drawing an animation of the state of charge, in blocking code, so my other realtime (stock trading and TV) apps stutter. And, if there was already valid info on the SOC meter, it gets wiped up while you are waiting. It can take over 5 minutes to find out state of charge on this app! Every single page element is reloaded from scratch and re-initialized in response to every single user action, often wiping out valuable data you had already showing each time. And yes, it logs you out every 30 min - during which time you may or may not have gotten the data you wanted. This site must hit 5-6 different (all slow) servers for each redraw. It's obviously done by drag-drop-monkey tools by someone who doesn't even know how to do that, plus a lot of pretty but useless art from some marketing idiot - owners don't need to see more crappy ads for something they already own (are you listening too, Amazon?).
Anything, and I mean even a site writen by a 13 year old retard who was the nephew of a GM exec would be superior. Thank god, the Volt runs linux in a cluster...that was done mostly inhouse and by IBM, who at least have a clue.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Yes. Michigan is enormous. It's farther from the Detroit to the straits of Macinac than it is from Detroit to New York City, and the straits are only a little over halfway to the border.
It also has an unusually high-reliability power grid. (It had to be designed for some severe storms and icing.) During the great northeast blackout the problem propagated to the Detroit Windsor boundary, Detroit Edison's equipment detected it, and cut off from the east coast. Pick a spot (like the west side of Ann Arbor) where Detroit Edison and Consolidated meet and you can get redundant feeds from both company's grids (as Compuserve did long ago), in addition to your backup UPS and generator. (Ann Arbor is also a good spot for communication connectivity, too.)
Michigan's topography breaks up the weather patterns enough that even a few tens of miles of separation often make the difference between a heavy storm and clear skies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And they are the king of cost-cutting. They outsource many other things, but still insist on keeping their IT in-house.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
What was high-risk was outsourcing to the likes of IBM, HP, CapGemeni, wipepro, etc. who outsource the work to India or China. That information is then able to be used against GM. Real stupid on GM's part.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Michigan is roughly as big as the U.K., maybe that will bring some perspective.
Good-bye
I have a simple rule:
Out-source monkey work. If it's something you can write instructions for that're sufficiently clear and detailed that a moderately-housebroken monkey can follow them successfully, it's a candidate for outsourcing.
In-source anything requiring intelligence, business knowledge or judgement. If you're depending on the people doing the job to know what they're doing and do it well then you want people that you have control over, you don't want people who answer to someone else. To find out who they answer to, ask one question: "Who signs their paycheck?". That's who they answer to.
Regardless of the above, in-source anything where a failure will cause a business interruption. If it's going to stop your business from operating if it's not working right, you want the people responsible for it under your control and answering to you. That way you can decide whether it's worth the overtime to keep them in until it's fixed. You do not want that decision left in the hands of someone whose business isn't being impacted by the problem and who won't suffer if the problem continues.
Ugh, I'm a noob, DTE lost power, Consumers did not*
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.
You only outsource general functions like IT, payroll, maintenance and so on when you are small enough that it makes economic sense to do so. When the amount and kind of service you need is such that it would cost more to employ people in house than to outsource it, you do. However when you get large, it is silly to outsource. You can get it cheaper in house since you are large enough to need the equivalent of many full time people working for you, and if they are outsourced it is just another layer of cost.
A small business of 5 people? Ya you probably want to outsource IT needs (and other stuff). It would be infeasible to hire an IT person and have 17% of your staff be IT. A company of twenty thousand people? Don't outsource it, you will need a hundred plus IT people anyhow, might as well have them work directly for you.
Detroit did lose power and is DTE, but I know it didn't hit Grand Rapids which is not DTE. Ann Arbor is still on DTE and I believe power was lost there.
You can see the areas DTE services on their outage map.
http://dteenergy.com/map/outage.html/
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.