Q&A: GM CIO Ralph Szygenda on outsourcing, IT's importance

Computerworld - General Motors Corp. CIO Ralph Szygenda is in the midst of negotiating the largest corporate outsourcing deal in history, worth about $15 billion. Electronic Data Systems Corp. now handles two-thirds of GM's outsourcing, and this rebidding of the EDS pact may have implications for other companies, Szygenda believes, because he wants all the vendors to work to common standards.
Szygenda, who received this year's top award at the 2005 Computerworld Honors Program last night, was interviewed by Computerworld at the event. He discussed the importance of IT at GM and what IT leaders need, in terms of skills and education, to survive in today's corporate environment.
(This interview was conducted before today's announcement by GM that it plans to lay off 25,000 workers.)
You're familiar with the arguments raised by Nicholas Carr and his comments about whether IT matters. What's your take? IT matters a lot. Is there going to be some commercialization, standardization or products and services? Yes. There are certain areas of the business, like ERP systems ... that will become commodities. I think that's the point he was trying to make. He overstated it, though.
In fact, [IT] will be bigger than ever. Having premium products at lowest price versus premium price -- and it's kind of the Wal-Mart model -- that's one [trend] driving the industry. The other one is globalization. And all companies like GM, even though they had operations throughout the world, they were kind of regional. Now they are running throughout the world, and they globalize them. Given those two things, companies are going to redo all their processes again, reautomate them, and I guarantee you at that point IT is not dead.
Do you see IT heading toward any particular architecture faster than some others? Is grid computing, for instance, on your radar? It's always on the radar. Everything is on the radar. But again, I've been around 35 years, so I've seen all kinds of changes in the industry. ... Except for the Internet and probably for distributed computing, the PC, I've seen things that have been evolutionary but I haven't seen things that have been revolutionary. ... Grid computing is not revolutionary. The first environment I worked on was advanced scientific computing. ... Effectively, it was multiple parallel processors. So grid computing is not a new concept. It's just one that is doable and can work.
How do you ensure that IT is aligned with the business at GM? IT people have to be business people to start with. There is