For Partners, It's GM's Way Or The Highway - Yahoo! News

Cool article about how GM is handing out $15 billion in outsourcing contracts, and how it intends to force standards on recipients so that another vendr can step in easily. Very good writeup on the current state of outsourcing. Makes me believe that after GM sets these expectations, within a few years many more companies will expect the same. I never thought much of outsourcing before, but if GM follows this path, it makes me think that outsourcing is a major trend that hasn't lost steam, and will only get more widespread.

For Partners, It's GM's Way Or The Highway - Yahoo! News: "Szygenda says he came to the conclusion three years ago that the outsourcing status quo was out of kilter. GM had a Web site called Hermes, to sell cars in Brazil. The site -- run by EDS, IBM, and a handful of others -- kept crashing. And when Szygenda got on a conference call with his tech suppliers, 'there was a lot of finger-pointing, and nobody would fess up to the problem,' he recalls. 'I realized this wasn't going to work. And I saw it wasn't just a GM problem. It was an industry problem.'
So Szygenda set out to rethink how technology should be managed. With his leverage as the world's largest tech outsourcer, he had the muscle to turn these thoughts into action. Last year, he invited a dozen major tech companies to help him design the rules that all would have to follow. The result: No matter which suppliers do a particular job, they do it GM's way."