General Motors Co will open a third U.S. information technology center
as part of its plan to bring that work in-house and improve the
automaker's efficiency and productivity.
GM said on Thursday it will
hire about 1,000 people, including software developers, database experts
and business analysts, to staff the center near Atlanta. It will be the
third of four centers in the United States GM previously said it would
open.
Last summer, GM, a pioneer in outsourcing information
technology, said it would reverse that trend with plans to vastly expand
the number of in-house IT experts over three years.
At the time
of the announcement, GM outsourced some 90 percent of its IT services
and provided 10 percent of that work in-house, an approach that had been
the model at the Detroit company for most of the last three decades.
The U.S. automaker said it planned to flip those percentages.
GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott, a former Hewlett-Packard Co
executive, outlined his plans last June to GM's IT employees, which
then numbered about 1,500. GM currently employs about 2,200 IT staff and
that number will rise to about 9,000 when the transition is completed,
Mott said on Thursday.
"We've been on a journey for the
past few months to transform GM IT," Mott told reporters on a conference
call. "One of the key strategies in this turnaround is the opening of
(information technology) innovation centers in key U.S. markets and
bringing the work back in-house to GM."
Last October, GM said it
would shift 3,000 people over six months to its payroll from HP, which
has long handled IT work for the automaker.
In the two months
prior to that, GM had announced plans to hire 2,000 workers to staff new
IT centers in Texas and Michigan. The location of the fourth IT center
will be announced later but employment will be on the same scale, Mott
said.
GM said it has hired more than 700 IT specialists to work at
the centers in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan. The Georgia center
will be located in Roswell, a northern suburb of Atlanta, and Mott said
interviews for the location will begin next week with hiring to occur as
soon as possible.
© Thomson Reuters 2012