Understanding fstab ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

Open Source Usage and Economic Benefits

• Economic benefits from open source are both direct and indirect. The direct benefits begin with the fact that, generally, open source software is distributed without a software license fee and is extended to the entire hardware and software stack and related services when compared with proprietary systems. In place of the license fee, customers are offered an optional subscription for services or support fee per server. While self-support isn’t an option for most customers, entertaining competing bids for support is a very attractive proposition. This can result in lower costs for support throughout the life cycle of the open source component or application. There are also indirect economic benefits that ultimately accrue to everyone who adopts open source from the more efficient use of resources across the industry, with less redundancy and fewer opportunities for any one vendor to monopolize a product category. This helps to minimize vendor costs and, therefore, keep customer expenses down.

• open source software doesn’t necessarily do a better job of delivering business value than commercial software. It isn’t necessarily easier to develop new applications with open source software, and it doesn’t necessarily produce better applications than commercial software. But a majority of respondents did indicate that open source was playing a role in helping to lower their companies’ overall operating costs, a business benefit that can’t be underestimated. A majority of respondents indicated that open source software played an important role in improving the quality of their companies’ products and business processes . This goes along with the perception of the high quality of open source software itself and the flexibility open source provides that can allow changes and modifications to be made more quickly and with less effort. This is a clear benefit, although one that is difficult to quantify in hard dollars. On the other hand, a majority of respondents did not see open source playing an important role in directly affecting their companies’ abilities to acquire and retain new customers or to manage ongoing customer relationships. This points to the fact that in practice, open source software is technology, and the impact on customers will come from what a firm does with that technology, not the technology itself. The other attributes of open source, such as community, choice, and flexibility, are harder to translate into customer relationship benefits.

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efforts to change business processes

http://www.gartner.com/research/fellows/asset_156513_1176.jsp

General Motors' CIO Ralph Szygenda reflects on his efforts to change business processes at GM, GM's new $15 billion outsourcing deal and his plans to profoundly improve the way in which IT vendors deliver services.

Ralph Szygenda serves as CIO for General Motors (GM), has more than 2,000 employees, oversees the delivery of IT services by tens of thousands of IT outsourcing associates and is responsible for a $3 billion annual IT budget. 2006 marks his 10th year at the world's largest automobile manufacturer. We chose this milestone as an ideal time to sit down with him to discuss his role in changing business processes at GM, his company's new $15 billion IT outsourcing deal, his quest to improve IT vendor processes and his view on the future of IT as a career.






Gartner:


How long ago would people around here have talked about business processes as an issue that needed to be addressed at GM?

Ralph Szygenda:


Well, when I came into the company, it was the number-one issue. You've got to remember, GM was behind a number of domestic automotive companies in terms of productivity, quality and product development cycle time in 1996.

Gartner:


Where were the difficulties with business processes a condition explained to you prior to being employed?

Szygenda:


Sure, that's why I came here. This was a wonderful opportunity; it was the impossible job.

When I came to the company, the issue was common. Jack Smith (the chairman and CEO at that time) told me that we didn't have common processes, that we didn't have common systems. Later on, we figured out GM had 7,000 information systems. Now, a lot of those information systems were redundant; they were in each business unit doing similar things. So the autonomous business units were one thing helping to create the business process challenge at GM.

The second thing was that, for 12 years, IT was effectively outsourced to EDS and run as a separate company from GM. The strategic management of IT was given to another company that was not integrated into GM. So we had a 12-year separation from that knowledge base.

Furthermore, there was no CIO - that tells you something. In 1996, GM was the world's largest company, and it never had a CIO. Back then, many companies had CIOs.

Finally, I put in process information officers in 1996/1997. It took until 1999 to put in business process officers; then we dual-headed them for a while.

Gartner:


The first set of process officers were for IT processing?

Szygenda:


The first business process officers were in IT; I put them in first in 1996. They had process knowledge, and they started to drive the process mentality of the company.

Gartner:


How did you find those individuals, particularly those who knew the businesses processes outside of IT?

Szygenda:


I needed traditional CIOs, but I also needed people that had process knowledge that the automotive industry would trust. So I had to go out and get these "horizontals" that were great process people and great information technologists. For the top 30 jobs, I interviewed more than 300 people. We needed somebody that was a business leader and a great technologist, but they weren't coding every day. So they had to be a different breed. I've always called them IT brokers, brokers in technology, but they had to know more than the outsourcer.

Gartner:


Know more about what than the outsourcer?

Szygenda:


About implementing information technology to change the business.

Gartner:


Could you just spend a few moments explaining the nature of the new GM outsourcing deals?

Szygenda:


Let me go through the three different IT models, or generations, at GM and why the third one is different.

The first one was EDS, 1984 to 1996. In this model, one outsourcer got the total strategic management of IT. GM really didn't have knowledge invested in the company or a hand in managing it. What's the problem with that? There was no competitive nature. GM did not have the IT knowledge to transform its business as fast as it wanted to. EDS, because it was owned by GM, created the same structure, so it created autonomous profit and loss centers inside General Motors.

The second generation, from about 1996 to 2003, insourced back the strategic management. I brought 1,000 of the best information technologists outside of General Motors, and I took 1,000 of the best automotive people inside. I put them together and that was the strategic management of IT in the company.

In addition, I diversified the supplier base for a competitive environment. So most major IT companies were working into GM; a lot of them had to learn the business over time. So, effectively, a third of the business was moved to other companies besides EDS at that time - $12 billion of cost was taken out of the company. We took $7 billion of this savings and redid the IT infrastructure and improved systems across GM.

Gartner:


So there were clear benefits from outsourcing?

Szygenda:


There were phenomenal benefits, but I knew that we were going to have trouble. I knew the outsourced model was going to fail in time.

In 2003, something happened. GM had become totally digital. Also, because processes had changed, the company was speeding up drastically. Also, in 2003, I was looking at IT operational problems we were having. I started to see cracks. The issue was that there were so many real-time processes. When a problem occurred, we'd have four or five companies involved, which occurs whether you're totally insourced or outsourced. All these IT companies had their own model for how to manage IT inside GM, and we were using those 2,000 people to knit IT together. It was taking too long to resolve issues.

So around 2003, I just knew the model was running out. We were moving to become a global business, and the IT companies had no global structure to manage IT - meaning if you talked to IBM, IBM had an IBM-Australia and an IBM China, but there wasn't a single IBM environment. So as I moved globally, I was knitting them together throughout the world. I had to make outsourcing work at GM. I had to make an outsourced model with multiple suppliers look like one vendor, both from an IT process viewpoint and from a global management perspective.

Well, the IT industry had neither of those, and I'm only going with a five-year contract. My belief is anything longer is suicidal, though such contracts are signed in the IT business every day.

So, how could I solve this problem? I said we have to come up with some common standard processes at General Motors for IT management. We run an IT business. Right now, it's down to about $3 billion a year, but that's a big company to manage. How do you manage $3 billion?

Gartner:


That's a Fortune 500 company.

Szygenda:


Right, and you don't have processes to manage it? On the one side, I was talking about product development processes and the automotive company supply chain, but on the IT side, I had none, so what I did was —

Gartner:


But that's been going on for decades. What brought you to that conclusion around the 2003 time frame? What happened?

Szygenda:


I said I've got to put these processes together, but I want them to be thin processes. I don't want to have to tell every IT company how to run everything down to coding; it has to let the collaboration work to look like one company, so it's thin. In addition, we have to put this together, but even more it's got to be a win-win. The other thing is I'm bidding $15 billion - there's probably nobody else (for maybe the next 10 or 15 years) who will have the opportunity to buy that much at one time. So having the economic buying power helped.

I sat down with Sam Palmisano, Michael Jordan, Carly Fiorina (at that time) and John Chambers. I went down through the industry and I explained this to them - this is as much your problem as my problem. And by the way, you don't even do it the same way across your company, so you don't have efficiency going from one account to another.

Gartner:


Who offered the most resistance?

Szygenda:


Nobody.

Gartner:


You know what, Ralph? I don't believe you. You didn't get any resistance?

Szygenda:


Nobody. First, I wasn't dictating anything. I was explaining it. I talked to Ballmer, and some of this was new. The issue is they don't understand corporations, so they didn't really know what they were doing with their technology. They started off selling products; then they started getting into the services business (like running computing centers) and then maybe coming to help companies do process. They were implementing business process outsourcing (BPO) for payroll, which forced me to say, "I want you to help run information technology and the process for sales and marketing across General Motors - it's never been done." I told them to come to GM full-time. I wanted them to send their people, and I said I'd have them all work together in a room.

Gartner:


What time frame are we talking about?

Szygenda:


About two years ago, it was right after the 2003 epiphany. And I said we're going to lock you up in a room. I'll pay for some of your people to sit in a room. You can pick up the other costs, but I'll pay for the subject matter experts. So we had almost every major IT company in the world, the systems integrators, but then we had a separate forum for product companies, because that was a different thing. We said that there was one requirement, secrecy - you cannot tell anybody you're doing this. We didn't have time for disruption. I was trying to get the 2006 transformation done at General Motors.

The other thing I said is: Whatever we do here, you can take. I'm not going to make it proprietary to General Motors. You can start using it on day one.

So now we have 44 thin processes, and about 27 apply to outsourcers. Our concerns range from contracts, to asset management, to requirement definitions for systems. We didn't want to do anything that was not using the standards in the industry. I didn't want to do anything new; I didn't want to create anything there except these things, and you could take them and use them.

Gartner:


Are those 44 processes documented somewhere?

Szygenda:


Oh, yeah.

Gartner:


Do you believe that someone in Germany with EDS could move to Brazil and do the same thing? Are the new vendor processes that transparent?

Szygenda:


You bet. Not only that - what's more interesting is I could get rid of these suppliers and bring in another one pretty quickly

Gartner:


Does that reduce their cost of delivery of services to you?

Szygenda:


You bet.

Gartner:


Do you see those savings?

Szygenda:


I won't tell you the actual amount of savings, but over the next five years, GM will save a lot of money. And realize, that's after we have taken $12 billion out. So it's quite amazing and —

Gartner:


Ralph, is that going to be another $12 billion or so in savings?

Szygenda:


I can't say more. It won't be at that level, but it's in the billions.

Gartner:


With regard to the outsourcing deals, what does success look like? How will GM know you've succeeded?

Szygenda:


Well, on 6 June, I will have global contracts implemented, meaning I've got one company that's going to manage everything in a particular segment such as sales and marketing. There were three segments that were bid out – sales and marketing systems, dealer systems, and parts and service systems.

So one company owns this for every area of General Motors throughout the world. The same thing here, the same thing there, never been done before in history. I have metrics and contract requirements on every one of these segments. I have performance metrics. For development, it's firm fixed price development in this company. All sustained applications have metrics, and the improvement of moving away from old and driving toward the new is a benefit at General Motors. This includes computing environments – all computing performance, all telecommunications performance. Not only that, if you don't meet any of the requirements, there are penalties – financial penalties on everything you do.

Gartner:


Are those technical metrics, or are they business metrics?

Szygenda:


They're both. GM has metrics – my people are all measured on business metrics, pretty much.

Gartner:


For example?

Szygenda:


Basically, there's cycle time in product development. They're measured on that. If I have people working for me and they're building a two-million-line system, and they deliver it on time and within budget, but it doesn't change the business, they've failed at General Motors.

Gartner:


Let's talk about that business change. Again, what would we be measuring to determine whether the business change took place or not?

Szygenda:


There's a business case on all major developments, so you can measure them. And realize it's outsourced here, so everything is by contract. Everything's measurable here, whereas in an internal business, it's kind of a guess. When I contract something and say I want to change that cycle time, improve that quality, or whatever, I break it down to the systems environment, the operational environment. There are metrics for every one of those things by contract.

Gartner:


Would I have to improve profit margin to get my bonus if I worked for you?

Szygenda:


In the sales, service and marketing area, you would be measured by that in the business area, as well as information technology. We have a performance management program and objectives that are set at the beginning of the year with me, and you've got to realize the way GM does it now: You have the top corporate objectives, it goes down to each of the people on my boss Rick Wagoner's staff, and then we all integrate our performance together, so I know everybody's objectives in the company. Then it goes down to all my people, where we all are integrated. So my process information officers are integrated with my chief information officers; that's all measurable. So you have business metrics, and you have IT metrics. Let's say there's a new sales and marketing warranty system. Is it on time or not? If I miss by six months, what did it cost GM by not having that warranty system in place? Well, it just cost GM about $300 million, and that's probably not a good thing. That's exactly the way we run the business.

Gartner:


Your organization will start a number of projects this year. What percentage of those will be the brainchild of your people?

Szygenda:


None of them. It's done jointly with the business, because my people, who have been here over the past 10 years, have been so integrated into the business that there is no division. I couldn't tell you where the IT and the business people stop. My head of product development, Terry Klein, is so integrated in the product development organization that it is as one.

Gartner:


What's the most important project that will be completed this year?

Szygenda:


There are a lot of them. In sales and marketing, a major warranty system across business. In product development, a new global, integrated product data management environment for reuse of parts across the company.

Gartner:


Are any of these projects this year bringing IT to a business process function that IT has never touched before?

Szygenda:


I'd say there's collaboration on a global basis on almost every one of them. Toyota has an unbelievably good global model, but Toyota is just expanding globally, whereas GM is already global. So we have a little bit different perspective. They all started from one common core in Japan, so they've been common to start with. It's like a clean sheet of paper. We started 100 years ago. So their approach is different, but they're trying to move into different regions, so they're probably going to have a growth in terms of how to organize that all together. But right now, I think the IT collaboration environment that we have throughout the world is second to none. It's real time. It will help us be global.

Gartner:


How often do you meet with Rick Wagoner (Chairman and CEO of GM)?

Szygenda:


At least weekly. We even e-mail each other on the weekends. The business changes so much. It's not only him. The communication is with every leader in this company.

Gartner:


Are his issues IT-related?

Szygenda:


No, his issues with me concern business transformation, or changes in the business, or something of that sort. He's gotten more involved because of this new IT model. Realize that we're changing the IT for all of GM.

Gartner:


Would you tell a high school graduate thinking of going to college next year to enter the IT field?

Szygenda:


Sure, as long as they're also getting a business background with it. If they're just getting IT, no. So, the answer is, you've got to get a grounding in IT, but you better assume you're going to be a business information technology broker, versus an information technology designer. You might be building, you might be buying, but if you want to protect your long-term viability, you must have a total business sense, versus just one technology element.

Sure, your job could be offshored or outsourced or whatever. But if you put business knowledge together with information technology, it's probably one of the greatest opportunities that you could ever have.

Gartner:


Thank you, Ralph.

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tharaka
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