Last fall, speaking at Dell Computer's DirectConnect conference , Ford Motor President and CEO Jacques Nasser sounded like a dot-com entrepreneur flush with excitement over the vast possibilities of e-business. Ford, Nasser told his audience, was rushing to transform itself into a customer-focused e-business. "Technology and networks in particular determine the shape of everything else," he said.
You'd think Nasser's tech-centric words would have warmed the hearts of Ford's top IT managers. But, even as Nasser was poised to rev up the engine of change and slam Ford's e-business initiative into gear, a nagging question was running through the mind of IT Services Director George Surdu and other IT execs: Did Ford's IT organization, although massive, with some 6,000 people, have enough gas in the tank to deliver on Nasser's ambitious vision?
After much soul-searching, they came up with a disturbing answer: No. The IT organisation was not ready for e-business.
"When business [managers] got the message that they could transform the business using technology, they all went to IT, and IT told them, 'We're busy. We'll get back to you in 2010 because we've got this big list of requirements, things we have to do,'" said J. Stewart Caulfield, an IT services global manager at Ford. "The basic message from top management was, 'This is not going to work. We need Web sites. We need B2B. ...' [But] IT couldn't respond."
Centralise to succeed
So Surdu, Caulfield and other execs launched a top-to-bottom overhaul of Ford's application maintenance and development organisations.
Designed to allow Ford to crank out new applications at the speed of e-business while cutting costs and improving quality, the restructuring pulled Ford's software development and maintenance units out of the key business functions to which they'd been dedicated and steered them into a new, centralised organisation where they could, for the first time, be run as truly independent businesses, each with its own profit-and-loss responsibility.
The result has been dramatic and positive. While the recently completed IT rebuild took more than 18 months and was not free of political pain, it's allowed Ford to more than double application development and deployment productivity while cutting costs by 23 percent.
"We're still not where we want to be, but there's a recognition in the company that output [from the IT organisation] is far greater than it was in the past," Surdu said.
