IT at GM
Here is an interesting post on IT considerations at GM: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/GM-IT-Steers-Through-the-Economic-Storm/.
From my perspective as a sales person here at Colligo, there were a few useful datapoints.
First and foremost was the sheer number of applications: “Killeen said GM eliminated 300 applications in 2008, reducing its corporate total from 2,200 to 1,900. Back in 1996, when Szygenda took the reins at GM, the application total was a budget-busting 7,000. At that time, Szygenda has estimated, GM had the highest IT costs per vehicle in the auto industry.” This staggering number of applications speaks to the sheer complexity of the industry. Many of my clients these days are trying to simplify their software stack. When you layer all the various aspects of support, upgrades, patches, and interdependecies into 7,000 applications you can only imagine the headaches. Additionally, I will feel better about CIO’s not calling me back right away – after all they might have 1k’s of other sales reps calling!
Also, Siemens Teamcentre is serving as the point of entry for SharePoint into the rest of GM. Several of my clients looked at Colligo as an offline solution for Teamcentre prior to Siemens acquiring UGS. Working with large files locally and syncing them to SharePoint later was preferred by some engineers. It is a slick product.
