General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda says IT matters a lot. There are certain areas of the business, like ERP systems, that will become commodities. In fact, [IT] will be bigger than ever. Having premium products at the lowest price - kind of the Wal-Mart model - that's one [trend] driving the industry. The other one is globalization. Given those two things, companies are going to redo all their processes again, and at that point, IT is not dead. IT people have to be business people to start with. There is no chance of just being a technologist anymore. In precision information technology, every dollar that you invest in information technology better deliver business results or you are not going to succeed. To do that, you have to understand the business as well. At General Motors, people working for the CIO are great business leaders and great technologists. In the future, [they're] going to be [the] only survivors, and that's going to be hard for a lot of people because they didn't have both of those capabilities. The whole end goal within GM is to build the greatest cars and trucks, not to build great IT. It's just an enabler.
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