"General Motors' information systems and services organization has long viewed CMMI as the preferred framework for deploying common IT process improvements globally," says Ralph Szygenda, CIO and group vice president of General Motors. "But we encountered a growing problem in IT acquisition and IT supply chain management: in dealing with third party suppliers, we found that the process maturity of the acquirer can materially impact the effectiveness of the supplier and thus the capabilities that we add to our business." Sygenda says he wrote a letter to Paul Nielson, CEO of the Software Engineering Institute, in 2004 saying, "CMMI is nice, but most of the efforts in corporations today are not building from scratch in development any more." According to Forrester Research, three-quarters of IT dollars today go into software acquisition, deployment and integration. GM and SEI spent two years co-developing the new CMMI extension. "This new model will enable organizations to better engage, monitor and measure third-party suppliers, producing better outcomes and results in IT and technical acquisition," Szygenda says.

Working with CMMI for Acquisition has driven some organizational changes at GM, Szygenda says. When having IT providers (such as HP, Cap Gemini and Cisco) work together on projects, "We traditionally had GM IT experts direct those people every day and tell them what to do. We realized we didn't have time to do that any more in a real-time environment. We had to have sort of collaboration, effectively social networking, between the supplier base and the acquirer where they communicated without direction. Most people will say that's impossible, but today, that's the way it runs at GM." The CMMI for Acquisition framework made this possible, he says. "I don't know how revolutionary this is, but amazingly sometimes standardization and simplification lead to innovation."

According to Dun & Bradstreet, 20 to 25 percent of large information technology acquisition projects fail within two years and 50 percent fail within five years. "In a March 2004 GAO report, we reported that three fundamental strategies can be implemented to ensure the delivery of high quality product on time and within budget: working in an evolutionary environment, following disciplined processes, and collecting and analyzing meaningful metrics to measure progress," says Keith Rhodes, chief technologist at the U.S. General Accountability Office. "Anyone who is interested in process improvement, especially in the acquisition world, should consider adopting CMMI for Acquisition. It provides an opportunity to avoid or eliminate stovepipes and barriers through improved operational efficiency and helps guide organizations to realizing these fundamental strategies."

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