Hyundai Targets 'Vital Few'

Hyundai Motor America CIO Rich Hoffman, speaking at InformationWeek's Fall conference last week, talked about how Hyundai has set a goal to sell 1 million cars by 2010, more than three times its sales today, and what business technology it needs to accomplish that. Hyundai, which spends 0.3% of sales on IT, compared with the automotive industry's average of 1% to 1.5%, has taken an approach Hoffman calls focusing on "the vital few" IT projects. From a technology standpoint, those include data warehousing, security, voice-response and Web self-service tools for customer service, and training and learning development.