Training Razes IT's Tower Of Babel

There comes a time in everyone's career when he or she must face a moment of truth. For Roy Campbell, it happened five years ago when he laughed during a vendor presentation. That's not particularly noteworthy, except the vendor wasn't trying to be funny.

Campbell, who's been with General Motors for 30 years, was two weeks into his role as CIO of GM Canada when he traveled to Houston for a meeting with Compaq. One of the computer company's execs was enthusiastically discussing Compaq's technology and future plans--until Campbell became noticeably amused.

Apologizing, he explained his reaction to the vendor. "I didn't understand three words of what this guy was saying," Campbell says. It wasn't because the Compaq presenter spoke gibberish. Campbell simply wasn't fluent in current IT lingo. "Basically, I had been asleep for 15 years, out of the world of technology."

That was one signpost pointing to GM's overdue need to level the playing field. As a heavily outsourced company, GM wanted employees to understand whether vendors had done their homework. But many GM employees -- including Campbell -- felt like Rip Van Winkle during the mid-'90s. That's because EDS had been running the automaker's IS department since 1984, until GM spun off the company in 1996.

To give employees' tech savvy a turbo boost, GM created the Skills for Success program. The year-long IT training curriculum encompasses IT architectures and infrastructures; telecommunications; network and system security; application development; and intranets, the Internet, and the Web. It also includes a case study on infrastructure integration, requiring participants to do capacity planning for a site that receives 5 million visitors in one day.

"What we were undertaking was nothing less than a total transformation of GM's internal IT operations that would require us to intelligently define and manage an outsourced program to be executed by tens of thousands of contractors," says Ralph Szygenda, GM's CIO and group VP. "We were playing catch-up, which would require an intensive training program that had to get under way in a very short time frame."

While the main goal was to help Information Systems & Services (IS&S) employees speak the same language, Skills for Success has provided GM with important lessons other than technology. Not only does the program demonstrate the benefits of peer mentoring and the need for well-rounded IT employees, it also helps employees determine whether they belong in IT.

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Most of GM's technical staff had been transferred to EDS years earlier, so Szygenda faced a few challenges when he created IS&S to fill the void--namely, how to get hundreds of GM employees up to speed with the latest technology so they could make the most of vendor relationships.

It wasn't that the initial IS&S group completely lacked technical savvy. Szygenda did recruit about 200 IT veterans from outside GM ranks, such as former Navistar VP of engineering Kirk Gutmann, to shore up the group. But the rest of the group's employees--about 1,500 of them--were transferred from areas such as manufacturing, sales, and finance. Many knew the automotive business in great depth, having been with GM for decades.

Their IT acumen, however, wasn't quite as robust. "Some students didn't know what a browser was," says Jerry Gollick, a Skills for Success instructor. Some GM employees did have formal IT training, such as Campbell, but their skills were woefully out of date. Anything they knew was "pre-EDS"--before 1984. "We had been cut off from development inside GM, in terms of people and ideas. We had been gate-kept by EDS," Campbell says.

That put GM employees at a serious disadvantage when dealing with IT vendors. In the early days of IS&S, employees understood business goals thoroughly, but they didn't necessarily know what technology was needed to achieve those goals. Sometimes, that meant taking the word of the vendor, says Dennis Popiel, group training manager and associate dean of the IS&S College.

The results weren't always pretty. Architecture was overspecified on some projects, underspecified on others. Costs were either incredibly inflated or underestimated. "If somebody [at GM] needed a wheelbarrow, they would try to sell you a dump truck," Campbell says.

GM chose IT training company Learning Tree International to deliver the instruction and help develop the curriculum, particularly because Learning Tree was equipped to reach GM's global workforce. Although about 60% of GM's 1,700 IT employees are based in Michigan, the company also has facilities in locations such as Melbourne and Singapore.

Since the summer of 1999, more than 550 IS&S team members have graduated from the program, which included more than 170 hours of instruction. But those diplomas didn't come without a fight. "At first, everyone was scared to death," says Vicki Cornecelli, supervisor program systems, who graduated from the program last year. They had good reason. Each course includes a hefty 300-some-page information binder. The classes aren't at 101 levels; even veteran techies have complained about the difficult course material. Plus, at the end of each course is a test that students must pass--even if that means taking it several times.

In addition, the training schedule is grueling for many employees: Wednesday through Friday, noon to 9 p.m. (employees work at their regular jobs in the morning), plus Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The program's intensity gives students a taste of IT's pace today, Cornecelli says. That means quick decision-making, long hours, and plenty of endurance. "It makes you think about whether you really like to be in a fast-paced, changing environment," she says.

As a result, Skills for Success sometimes has had a Darwinian effect. Says Campbell: "There were some people that realized, 'Man, I made it through, but I really shouldn't be in IS&S.'" The way Szygenda sees it, that's the price of success--not only for GM, but for employees' individual careers.

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"The biggest challenge was that we had to keep the train moving while we trained our people," he says. "Everyone could not be in training at the same time, and individual employees couldn't be off the job for extended periods of time. I also had a personal conviction that, if GM was going to make this enormous investment in training, then our people should contribute some personal investment in their future as well."

That's been the case for Cornecelli. With a strong retail-management background, she had worked on IT budget management at GM for four years when she signed up for the Skills for Success program. "Before that, I knew what a PC was and what a server was, but I didn't know how they worked together," she says. "I'd just sit in meetings and say, 'Give me the numbers.'" Now, with her IT training, Cornecelli says she makes better business decisions that even vendors notice. "I started asking questions, and they'd say, 'What happened to you? Two months ago you didn't know JavaScript from HTML!'"

It wasn't easy for Cornecelli to reach that point. While taking the first course, which was an overview of all five, she'd come home and cry. "I'd think, what am I doing? I can't get through this." But she did make it through--and one thing that helped was having mentors within the class. "At first, I thought that people in the class who wrote code for a living would be arrogant," she says. Instead, they were very supportive. The classes' interactive environment encourages students with different skill levels to pair up.

IS&S executives decided early on that students with varying degrees of IT acumen would be taught together. The information exchange that occurs in that classroom demographic creates "a benefit that can rarely be achieved solely in the workplace," Szygenda says. Campbell, who graduated in early June, agrees that classroom interaction is critical. That's why he and all 40 of his Canadian IS employees traveled to Michigan for the training, even though that meant being away from home Wednesday through Saturday for weeks on end.

"Because we're a relatively new organization in GM, there's no formal network. You can read an org chart, but that's not really how the place works," he says. The training provided networking opportunities that were at least as valuable as the content being taught, he says. "Now we can get information in two minutes that would have taken two days to get before."

The program's success has spawned another curriculum track for Skills for Success graduates, which will launch later this year. The new curriculum will address more specific content, such as XML, data privacy, and Web enablement.

Although Campbell likens the Skills for Success experience to drinking from a fire hose, he says the payback is enormous. It's saved the company significant time and money when dealing with vendors, he says.

Campbell put that knowledge to the test soon after graduation, working with a GM team to develop an online application for dealers. With proposals coming in from two suppliers, the team quickly poked holes in the proposals and questioned architecture needs, bandwidth, and response times. "Eighteen months ago, that wouldn't have happened with the same intensity and thoroughness," he says.

Popiel agrees. "Now they know when a vendor is blowing smoke and hiding behind acronyms," he says. "Now they ask the right questions."