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346: In this interview, Peter High speaks with Randy Mott, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of General Motors. Among the topics they discuss include: How GM has evolved over the years that Randy has spent as CIO including switching from an outsourced IT workforce to an entirely incourced one by hiring thousands of new IT employees, consolidating data center operations into two enterprise data centers, and expanding the footprint towards new talent by creating four innovation centers. Randy’s perspective on how GM has been able to cut costs by providing automation for manual processes and the importance of taking advantages of new technologies. How GM’s IT team has been able to innovate including delivering new products and services driven by technology by creating a mobile center for customers, and developing a private cloud to increase efficiency. An overview of GM’s organizational structure, which is a centralized organization with both a vertical executives that have teams and report up the line and horizontal executives that support the vertical executives. Randy’s take on GM’s recruiting successes and pitch which is made successful by having a large footprint and ability to reach a large audience of college graduates, giving graduates the ability to pick which innovation center to work for, and having a reputation of being a successful company that gives them a lot of choice and opportunity. Randy’s perspective on driverless cars and how the company has been working on Cruise Automation. Randy’s advice to boards of smaller companies including increasing the use of direct reports of global CIO’s due to their amount of talent and exposure to what is happening across a broad technology. Randy’s advice to CIO’s looking to be on a board of an external company as well as his advice to CEO’s who are hesitant to allow CIO’s of that opportunity to be more progressive as it is a win-win situation. Randy’s emphasis on the application of new technology and the importance of evaluating the advancements of technology annually in a period of time where failure to innovate will result in major losses.