Press Releases
23 March 2012
Volkswagen founds Group IT Academy
Wolfsburg — Volkswagen has founded a Group IT Academy for information technology employees. The Academy has been set up as a cross-brand institution and the first brands to participate are AUDI AG and Financial Services AG. Dr. Horst Neumann, Volkswagen Board of Management Member for Human Resources, Bernd Osterloh, Group Works Council Chairman, Dr. Martin Hofmann, Head of Volkswagen Group IT, and representatives from the Group brands signed the deed of foundation in Wolfsburg on Friday.
Commenting on the founding of the IT Academy, Human Resources Board Member Dr. Horst Neumann said: “Volkswagen is setting a further milestone in the qualification of its employees with the Group IT Academy. IT is the digital nervous system of our company. Highly-qualified IT employees are therefore one of the prerequisites for efficient, competitive, and thus customer-oriented, management.”
Group Works Council Chairman Bernd Osterloh underlined that “IT is an important link in our Group. If IT systems are not compatible, then cooperation becomes just as difficult as if people do not understand one another. I am delighted that is not the case in the Volkswagen family, as the presence of my colleagues Peter Mosch from Audi, Markus Fasching from MAN and Uwe Hück from Porsche shows. The IT Academy is above all a symbol of how we are all moving closer together – beginning with the way we are learning from one another.”
As Dr. Hofmann, Head of Volkswagen Group IT, explained: “The Group IT Academy will intensify cooperation further and take us a big step forward with regard to the standardization of information technologies and system solutions used across the Group. We are thus strengthening the professionalism of the IT vocational group and harnessing the IT skills available throughout our Group for the further training of our employees, which will be to the benefit of our customers.”
The training programs offered by the Group IT Academy are directed at all IT employees in the Group and are organized by both internal and external sources such as AutoUni, IT vocational group experts, Volkswagen Coaching and Audi Academy as well as external software providers.
The founding ceremony for the Group IT Academy took place during the annual IT Symposium in Wolfsburg which was also attended by Audi and Volkswagen Financial Services. HR Board Member Dr. Neumann said: “This symposium marks the beginning of stronger IT cooperation in the Volkswagen family.”
The Volkswagen Group currently has an IT headcount of 5,800 and therefore has a lean organization. It is planned to recruit further highly-qualified experts. Insourcing what are at present outsourced IT services is also being discussed. At the moment, almost 10,000 people provide external services. Neumann said that IT would be setting up access to the Group intranet along with an e-mail address for every employee. Following presentations on state-of-the-art projects, the HR Board Member commented that the new IT management team was clearly taking Group IT forward.
Volkswagen Group IT connects millions of people every day: Advanced system solutions link some 500,000 employees internally and externally with over 230,000 contacts at suppliers and some 320,000 staff at dealers. In particular the electronic dialog with millions of customers all over the world is rapidly soaring. Group IT handles some six million e-mails each day. The latest computer center which Volkswagen commissioned in Wolfsburg last year has a peak performance of 24.3 billion arithmetic operations per second, corresponding to roughly one-fifth of the company’s entire computer performance. The Group’s IT budget in 2011 totaled some €1.8 billion.
