General Motors IT Innovation Center - Chandler, Ariz.

Every day, we work to improve GM, to make our company more efficient, more responsive and more customer-centric.  Our enterprise-wide focus on speed, simplicity and accountability are changing the way we do business, and that includes business functions like Information Technology.

GM’s IT function is in the midst of a huge, multi-year transformation to better support company-wide efforts to reduce costs, increase innovation, and deliver winning products around the world.  As part of this transformation, GM IT is moving from a heavily outsourced to a predominantly insourced model, which will help us achieve world-class performance at lower costs.  To drive innovation, we’re also creating four U.S.-based software- and systems-development centers staffed by GM employees.  We call them Innovation Centers, and I’m pleased to announce that we opened our fourth center earlier this week in Chandler, Arizona, in the Phoenix-metropolitan area.

We have already started recruiting and hiring software developers, database administrators and system analysts for the Chandler center.  They will join the more-than 1,000 employees we’ve already hired at our other three centers in Warren, Michigan; Austin, Texas; and Roswell, Georgia.  Over the next three to five years, we expect to hire more than 4,000 new IT workers to staff all four centers.

General Motors IT Innovation Center - Roswell, Ga.

Why four centers?  Recruiting talented IT professionals is intensely competitive.  At GM, we compete with many of the world’s top companies for talent, including Apple, Google, Boeing, GE, and many others, not to mention all of our automotive competitors.

To hire the best and the brightest, we need to create employment opportunities that differentiate our company from the competition, and location is one such advantage.  We chose the locations of our four Innovation Centers by looking at IT talent-rich areas that also offer a strong community, lower cost of living and a high-tech industry presence.

Combined, the four new GM centers have access to more than 7,000 students majoring in IT-related fields at more than150 colleges and universities.  We will target recruitment efforts at up to a dozen key universities within each of the four geographic regions.  In addition, each of the four locations is rich in existing IT talent.  Seventy-five percent of U.S.-based IT professionals are now located within 500 miles of one of our centers.

Our four Innovation Centers will support all aspects of business at GM. Employees will support web technologies, dealer systems, factory systems, vehicle technology and much more.  Our goal is to create and deliver world-class IT products and services to the entire company, and to accelerate the development and implementation of innovative IT solutions for existing and future business.  In the long-run, our vision is to enable and accelerate the company’s transformation by providing the best IT in the global auto industry.

We’ve taken a big step by opening our four new Innovation Centers.  Now the real transformation of GM IT begins in earnest.

Randy Mott is GM Vice President and Chief Information Officer, effective February 27, 2012. His most recent position was executive vice president and chief information officer of Hewlett-Packard, where he was responsible for the global information technology (IT) strategy and all of the company’s IT assets. This included company-wide application development, data management, technology infrastructure, data center operations and telecommunication networks worldwide. Mott’s vision and leadership approach has garnered him global recognition in leading transformational initiatives focused on optimizing IT as a business.