DETROIT — Randy Mott, General Motors’ chief information officer, plans to retire after a decade spent overhauling the automaker’s IT business.
GM has not yet announced Mott’s successor. Mott, 65, will stay with GM through a transition period, spokeswoman Maria Raynal told Automotive News.
Mott was hired in February 2012 as senior vice president of global information technology and chief information officer under former CEO Dan Akerson.
In June 2019, he was promoted to executive vice president.
Mott believed that IT operations could influence every aspect of GM’s business. In 2017, he told Automotive News that IT empowered CEO Mary Barra and other senior leaders to make quick, informed decisions with data that wasn’t as accessible before.
“The reality is, we’re an enabler,” Mott said at the time. “That’s our job. I think we’ve done that, but I think we can do it even more and better.”
Mott redefined GM’s IT business by insourcing IT operations and developing a private internal cloud and an advanced search engine of GM and third-party data that can be used for an assortment of research, such as projecting warranty or recall costs, breakeven points during a recession, or market and vehicle segment trends.
Mott hired more than 8,000 IT employees from 2012 through 2017, consolidated 23 outsourced data centers into two internal data centers and established IT innovation centers in Austin, Atlanta, Phoenix, Detroit and Ireland.
“Randy has streamlined our IT operations and built a secure and efficient IT infrastructure to drive business results,” Barra said in a statement this week. “We wish Randy all the best and thank him for his many contributions to GM over the past 10 years.”
Mott has spent more than four decades in the IT industry. Before joining GM, he was executive vice president and CIO of Hewlett-Packard. He also held high-ranking positions at Dell Inc. and Walmart Inc.