With 3000 jobs on the line, GM begins to return IT to the fold

In a more contrary to much of the way IT operations are currently handled in large enterprises, GM has decided to move from having much of their IT operation outsourced to bringing the bulk of those operations back under their internal IT umbrella. Announced as a three year plan back at the beginning of September, GM and HP announced yesterday that they would be transferring 3000 employees who work for HP on their GM contracts, directly to GM. The jobs being transferred internally are all located in the US and GM hopes to integrate all 3000 jobs into their current operations within the next 6 months.

GM, who currently operates 23 datacenters worldwide, is planning on reducing that number to two as part of their three-year plan. The plan also includes a goal of reducing the number of different applications that do the same job, streamlining and improving operations by standardizing on a much smaller set of appropriate backend applications. And while they are doing this they expect to increase the number of internal IT jobs by as many as 10,000.

GM CIO Randy Mott, who came to GM from the job as HP CIO, talked about the importance of building well-integrated teams and spoke to a desire to make IT a center of operations that drove business forward. And GM is not abandoning HP; they will be implementing a full range of HP solutions, described by George Kadifa, executive vice president of HP Software, as “ the largest deployment of our full product portfolio in the world, second to none, at this stage."