October 16, 2000

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IT Management
Tony Scott General Motors

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

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hen Tony Scott, General Motors Corp.'s chief technology officer, entered the University of Illinois in the early 1970s, he picked parks and recreation as his major. The computer age was expected to liberate everyone, and he figured that would fuel the theme-park business.

"All of that computerization and automation would give everyone a lot of free time--the theme-park business would explode," says Scott.

But Scott was bitten by the technology bug. He changed majors and transferred to the University of San Francisco, where he earned a degree in IS management.

Scott kept a foot in the technology and recreation areas. He accepted a job at Marriott Corp., which had opened theme parks in Santa Clara, Calif., and Chicago. From a retail-management job, he was promoted to the unusual title of manpower utilizer manager. "The job was to improve productivity and figure out where we needed people," he says. Scott helped write several computer programs aimed at improving Marriott's employee job-scheduling and park-attendance predictions.

He later served as a senior director in Price Waterhouse's companywide technology group. While there, he worked on a Price Waterhouse project with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., which was deploying SAP and needed major renovations to its network and desktop infrastructures. The work evolved into a new job--Bristol-Myers hired Scott as VP of information management and shared services in March 1996.

Scott joined GM last year. As CTO, he's responsible for ensuring that all of the company's technologies and architectures "fit together on an enterprise level."

The basic lessons Scott learned in the theme park business have served him well throughout his IT career. In both, "you have to think on your feet and move fast, and then adjust quickly if you make the wrong decisions," he says. "You've got to scale up quickly to support a few hundred or tens of thousands of people, and you've got to have the infrastructure to support that."

Continue on to profile of Roger Mowen, Eastman Chemical
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