How Elon Musk Approaches IT At Tesla

onehitwonder writes "In short, they build it themselves. When Tesla Motors needed to improve the back-end software that runs its business, CEO Elon Musk decided not to upgrade the company's SAP system. Instead, he told his CIO, Jay Vijayan, to have the IT organization build a new back-end system, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company's team of 25 software engineers developed the new system in about four months, and it provided the company with speed and agility at a time when it was experiencing costly delivery delays on its all-electric Model S."

Comments

Re:Now Open It

[smooth wombat]

does the company even know what it's going to be doing 10 years down the line?

Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).

Does SAP make it any easier to change as you company evolves over the next 10 years?

Hell no! SAP doesn't make it easy to change, PERIOD.

SAP isn't something you can just install and forget about it.

Don't worry. Once you install SAP you can never forget about it with the constant changing of screens to perform the simplest of operations.

Similar to SharePoint, except bigger.

If you were trying to extoll the virtues of SAP, you failed miserably.

It doesn't do anything on it's own.

It doesn't do much when you're using it other than get in your way.

You have to do a lot of work to make it work for you.

I thought the purpose of SAP (and Oracle) was to make my life easier. Why should I have to do a lot of work to make it work?