“Everybody can make a decent enough powertrain. But what differentiates you is what you can do with your software,” he says of car makers generally. “Companies have to be careful that they don’t outsource the crown jewels.”
Slowly but surely, I hope that we can learn that when used correctly, IT is more than a cost center, it is a competitive advantage, even if you don't think your product is IT related.
Even if you're lucky enough to be in an IT-enabled skunkworks or innovation center at a large not-high-tech company, your department exists at the continued pleasure of the non-IT people who control the real revenue streams. There won't be many internal job transfer opportunities for you either unless you fancy moving out of technology and becoming an 'X who programs', someone in a non-dev role who uses coding as a sort of personal competitive advantage. [1] [2]
I agree that technology is going to enable the business advances of the future even for companies that aren't high tech now, but at the individual contributor level it's a Sisyphean task to try to drive that change unless you're an executive yourself.
[1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html
[2] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/
but hey, IT stroke-fests are fun.
I learned early on in my career that I only wanted to work for companies that look at technology as a source of profits. If a company sees the technology department as no different from the sales department, that was the company for me. It has been my secret to a happy career, later in my career when I had reached the level of an executive, I was a partner in a company that we exited to Hotels.com, when we did one of our business partners called me on the phone and asked me if I would entertain cleaning up their technology. I remember asking pretty bluntly, if I turn your technology department from a cost center into a profit center will you invest in it. Her response was along the lines of I would have to see it to believe it, but yes I would. We exited that company 2 years later. Moral of the story is, businesses can no longer afford to take the view that they are not a technology company, it has disrupted and infiltrated everything. For the majority of businesses technology is part of the game, if they are doing it badly they are not playing the game well, if technology is not in their market, it will be and if it's not a business can leverage that to their advantage now.
If it's software that's in your product, or helps your product be produced more efficiently, and is a source of competitive advantage, you'd be foolish to outsource that.
The software that runs payroll, or general ledger? Feel free to outsource that.
I do agree about the risk of outsourcing the core business, but outsourcing makes sense if it's not core, as long as you use the right model. Ironically you have to really know how to build software well to recognize which outsourcing partners are any good. The companies best equiped to outsource are least likely to because they are already in control of their IT processes.
I've also seen these stakeholder meetings devolve into political battles that end up tearing the project apart due to bikeshedding concerns. These sort of projects are best outsourced to Product Owners with no organizational political affiliations. :)
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...
Having in-sourced IT can work, but it takes a lot of work to make sure you don't end up with just a boat load of B & C players that become complacent and work just hard enough to keep the status quo.
I suppose since GM has now experience both ways they can make it work this time. They are hiring many of the same old EDS (now HP) employees though [1] - hopefully they'll turn the old mindset around and be succesful in getting things done the way they intend to.
