WARREN ? On Monday, General Motors showed off a new $130 million data center in Warren and the automaker said it will spend $258 million to build another in Milford ? part of GM new mantra that world-class companies own and operate their own IT, not outsource it.
At a press conference during the tour, GM CEO Dan Akerson said that when GM outsourced its IT to Electronic Data Systems in the 1980s, it was an era of clay modeling, slide rules and typing pools. Now, every facet of the car business is wired and involves IT. And that means to be a top company, ?you have to have a core competency in IT. You have to own it, and you have to control it.?
Added Akerson: ?It?s the end of the outsourced model. We?re creating a team that is concentrating on driving our business 100 percent of the time.?
GM is in the process of hiring 10,000 in-house IT employees, taking jobs back from outsourcers. About 1,400 of them will work in the Warren center. About 35 percent of those 10,000 hires will be recent college graduates. Another 2,500 are former staff of Hewlett-Packard (which bought EDS), mostly in Michigan.
Besides Warren, GM is also building development centers in Austin, Texas, Roswell, Ga. (a suburb of Atlanta) and Chandler, Ariz. (a suburb of Phoenix).
Akerson and GM CIO Randy Mott said the in-house data centers and app development staff will make GM a faster, smarter, nimbler car company.
Mott said bringing the operations in-house replaces 35 different outsourcing agreement that meant ?35 processes, 35 sets of tools, 35 handoffs,? and much more chance for misunderstanding or error.
The development teams in Warren work on software to help manufacturing processes and communication between GM and its suppliers and among GM divisions internally.
