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Fred Killeen currently serves as General Motors’ Chief Systems and Technology Officer for GM’s Information Systems and Services, and is responsible for the evaluation of emerging information technologies and the insertion of those technologies into the mainstream of GM’s systems and infrastructure. Killeen is also responsible for the systems development process and application architecture for the Information Systems and Services organization. Here, he talks to Business Management’s Ben Thompson about why better collaboration is important for GM – and how Web 2.0 is helping the company get there.

BM. Web 2.0 technologies and ideas – blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking sites, etc. – have proven something of a cultural phenomenon over the past few years, and they now look set to change the face of the modern business. How are you embracing Web 2.0 over at GM?

FK. As you mentioned, a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies to date have been consumer-facing –sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, along with some of the better-known wikis and blogs out there have really taken the internet by storm and transformed the way people think about and interact with the web. So one of the things we’re really taking a hard look at is how to exploit those capabilities to add value to our operations, and there are two areas here. The first is that we can use them to help us improve from an external-facing sales and marketing standpoint, which goes out to our customers and the wider world; the other is to figure out how to leverage those technologies internally.

In terms of blogging, whilst we do run a number of blogs here at GM, we haven’t really realized their potential yet in terms of improving our internal operations. Where we do see definite opportunities, however, is in the area of wikis. A lot of the collaborative work that goes on amongst project teams has really benefited from the use of wikis and discussion forums; the ability to have people interact much more quickly, much more immediately on the web has been very powerful for us. We’ve seen benefits both within the IT team itself and also out in other areas of the company.

BM. You’re something of an early adopter of Web 2.0 capabilities. When did you first identify the potential for these emerging technologies?

FK. Some of these technologies have been around for quite some time now, and I guess from an emerging technology perspective we’ve been watching them now for around 18 months –even longer in the case of wikis and RSS. However, it’s only recently that they’ve started to come into the mainstream from an enterprise pint-of-view. The key thing for us was ensuring we had commercially supported software to use as a foundation.

What business benefits are you seeing so far? How are these methods impacting on the way you approach project collaboration, new product development and customer/employee relationships?

BM. What kind of feedback are you getting ¬– from employees, customers and other interested parties? How useful is this feedback?

FK. We’ve experienced a lot of enthusiasm about how these technologies can change the way people work, and certainly our employees are very excited by this. I’ll be honest though: we’re still very early in our implementation. There’s a cultural change aspect and a change management aspect around this that involves evolving the way people do their work and interact with each other, and that’s still ahead of us.

The whole mantra of Web 2.0 is that it’s turning the internet from a brochure into an interactive web. People enjoy the fact that they don’t have to e-mail Powerpoint presentations or Word documents to each other in order to share ideas; instead, they can just start a wiki and have people interact with it. It’s simple to do – you don’t need to be a technical expert to post the content, it’s something that anyone can do.

The other thing for us is that we’re a global company with employees spread all over the world working together. If they were all sitting in the same room it might not have quite the same impact, but because our people in different countries need to connect, Web 2.0 is invaluable. For example, we might have someone in Korea collaborating with someone in China who’s working with somebody in Brazil, who are all part of the same design team. To have that ability to support those people in three different geographic locations, and for them to be able to collaborate across time zones, is very powerful for us.

BM. What’s next for you at GM in terms of Web 2.0? How are you going to be approaching that change management aspect you mentioned earlier?

FK. There are a couple of things we’re doing. We’re seeding the company with Web 2.0 pilots to help us understand how such technologies get used within the company and to allow us to see what challenges we have from a change management standpoint – we recognize that there’s a significant amount of communication needed in order to educate users on how to use these technologies and how to engage with them. However, we also see that there’s great potential for changing the way we do a lot of things, from how we engage our users, to how we develop systems, to how we interact with our customers, right through to how we collaborate together in order to design and develop better cars and trucks.

If you look at the portfolio of Web 2.0 technologies, there’re a number of areas we could explore further. One that interests us greatly is the whole idea of how to exploit ‘mashups’ – I think there’s a great opportunity for us to start integrating the services we can offer internally with other services that exist outside of GM, blurring the line between what’s ‘GM’ and ‘not GM’. How do you take advantage of the full universe of the web and your internal systems and the internal systems of others and create that integration? That’s a huge area of interest for us.

I think Ajax will also play a big role for us in terms of helping us to get more interactivity into our applications and make more usable interfaces for our end-users.

One of the other areas that we’re looking at is the self-organizing aspects of data –metadata and self-tagging, for instance. How do you take a Flickr model or a Del.icio.us model and apply it within an enterprise? I think part of it is to strip away the very rigid, structured taxonomy of how people store information and let the users have input on how they think they should be able to find that information, and what information could help them in that process.

BM. Based on your own experiences at GM, what advice would you give to any companies just starting to think about getting involved in these types of projects?

FK. My input would be to do some pilots, and through those pilots understand how it changes the work and how it impacts the users and what you need to do from a change management standpoint. The thing that makes this technology great is that it’s reasonably simple yet allows you to exploit a whole host of capabilities. It’s less about being technology com