General Motors Corp. is in the business of manufacturing and selling motor vehicles. It's not in the business of delivering and managing information technology that supports its primary businesses. That was evident in its recent multisourcing deal, which cedes huge chunks of GM’s IT operations to EDS, IBM, HP, Capgemini, Compuware Covisint, and Wipro Technologies.

The deal represents a “tipping point for IT's transition from an order-taker to a process-oriented business function,” according to a report by Forrester Research analyst Robert McNeill. The multisourcing approach enables GM to tap best-of-breed suppliers and plug them directly into its IT services infrastructure.

The lingua franca binding them together is the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of best practices published by Britain’s Office of Government Commerce and adopted by some of the world’s largest companies, such as GM and Procter & Gamble. ITIL provides a common language for GM’s service providers to communicate with each other and with GM.

Under the deal, EDS will no longer be the exclusive outsourcing provider to GM, although it will still command the lion’s share of the work. EDS will coexist with other suppliers in what GM calls its third-generation outsourcing initiative. The goal is to maximize the return on GM’s $3 billion annual IT spend by parceling out work like application development, maintenance, application integration management, manufacturing quality assurance, middleware, and business-to-business supply chain management. GM will retain control of the overall IT architecture and related processes, but with a barebones IT staff of just 1,700 out of a total of 324,000 GM employees.

EDS’ contract, worth $3.8 billion over five years, covers mission-critical systems in product development, manufacturing, purchasing and supply chain, business services, mainframe operations, server operations, GM OnLine (desktops), local area networks, GMAC and OnStar.

HP’s deal, worth $700 million over the next five years, covers server management, application maintenance and systems integration. HP will manage GM’s engineering workstations, enterprise resource planning hosting, product development server environments, and many of the servers in GM’s Asia Pacific region.

IBM’s deal, worth up to $500 million over the next five years, covers GM’s service and parts operations, manufacturing quality assurance systems, and integration management and operations support of GM’s worldwide IT computing infrastructure.

Capgemini’s deal covers application integration management, including enterprise apps; global purchasing and supply chain; global sales, service, and marketing; business services; sales and marketing systems; and dealer systems.

Covisint Compuware Corporation will support business-to-business supply chain collaboration for more than 18,000 production and non-production suppliers. It will extend its B2B messaging and integration services capabilities to cover GM’s European, Asia-Pacific and Latin American suppliers.

Wipro, through its Integration Factory, will deliver middleware for GM process areas including sales, services and marketing; product development and engineering; manufacturing and quality; purchasing; business services; GMAC; and OnStar.

Sum of the Parts

GM’s third-generation outsourcing environment is composed of four main functions: strategic planning, architecture and standards, creating and sustaining business value, and management enablers. Each function in turn is made up of major processes and subprocesses.

Within creating and sustaining business value, for example, are four major process areas: systems delivery, service support, service delivery, and security and compliance. The ITIL processes at GM all fall under three of the four areas within as follows: service support (service desk management, incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management, operations monitoring), service delivery (service level management, service continuity management, availability management, capacity management), security and compliance (security management). These 11 processes, split up among all of GM’s service providers, constitute the kernel of GM’s IT operations model.