IT Strategy @ GM

GM is in bad economic shape now and selling it’s some of the famous brands.  Looks like Pontiac, Hummer , Saab and Saturn are officially dead now. So, GM probably has the other 4 great brands – Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick. GM has enjoyed the supremacy of No 1 Car  manufacturer for more than 70 years and now the moment of truth has come and its pretty hard for GM to take it.

One of the challenges for the executives at GM is not only to stay where they are but also to put efforts to regain their No 1 position, sooner or the later. There is an immense challenge ahead of GM’s CTO Fred Killeen to make sure that the GM stays in control of the IT costs.  According to a recent article in the eWeek, GM is doing a variety of things in IT to achieve it’s financial goals.

I really liked a statement of Killeen that “If you don’t invest in future of company, you won’t have one“.

Looks like before Killeen took over as CTO, there used to be thousands of applications at GM and now they are trying to consolidate and standardize the applications. Following software stack is core for GM…

• Siemens NX enterprise CAD application
• Siemens Teamcenter Community platform
• Microsoft Communicator for instant messaging
• Microsoft Sharepoint server for virtual meetings.
• VM Ware ESX
• Sun’s Virtualization Technology

VM Ware ESX and Sun’s virtualization technologies are implemented at its data centers. GM is not yet into the band wagon of the Cloud Computing. Perhaps GM may be skeptical about the reliability of the cloud computing from Google, Amazon and Salesforce.

In any case i am very surprised that GM is not adapting any of the open source solutions in the area of the Virtualization, Communication and Team Collaboration. I am sure many of the GM’s current strategy is falling into the expensive category and i believe GM can definitely benefit from the open source strategy. Of course, if i were Kelleen things may have been different 😉 .