GM Announces Atlanta-area Tech Center

Big Data Is Creating Big Jobs: 4.4 Million By 2015

General Motors, fresh off news that it’s wooing third-party app developers, on Thursday announced the third of its technology hubs will be in the Atlanta area, where it will hire 1,000 IT pros.

It’s already hiring for the new site, in Roswell, Ga., 10 miles north of Atlanta. Its career page listed 49 jobs there Friday. It plans to hire software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts and others.

GM CIO Randy Mott last fall announced that the company would bring back 90 percent of its outsourced IT work, reversing a trend of the past 30 years. It already has set up “technology innovation centers” in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Mich. Reportedly a fourth site is yet to be announced. The automaker also has put 3,000 HP workers who had been working on the GM account onto its payroll.

Mott told The Associated Press on Thursday:

We feel like based on what we’re trying to do, which is provide capability for our business, it’s much better to have people that understand not only technology but General Motors and the General Motors business.

Mott told InformationWeek that new employees would work across all of GM’s technology needs, including Web technology to interact with dealers, customer databases, factory systems and in-car technology.

Cheri Ott, GM’s director of human resources for global information technology, told me last fall in an interview for Dice.com that the idea behind the various tech hubs is to take location out of the hiring equation.

Where before we might have brought someone to Detroit, now we’re able to consider someone in the Austin area. We want to find the best talent in any of the technology spaces where we need people … by having these innovation centers across the United States. We want to make it desirable, regardless of where you live.