Tesla CIO Builds IT That Keeps Pace With Its Carspassword
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Jul 30, 2023 02:18 PM
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以下为2014年CIO Insight采访当时的特斯拉CIO Jay Vijayan的记录，主要阐述了特斯拉选择自主研发核心IT系统的原因：速度和敏捷、无缝集成、高效运营（与客户交互形成闭环）。
Jay Vijayan, CIO for Tesla Motors, is responsible for the company’s business applications, infrastructure, network, systems operations and security. Learn how he helped IT evolve into a global organization that is a key enabler supporting the growth and success of the company’s business.
特斯拉汽车首席信息官Jay Vijayan负责公司的业务应用、基础设施、网络、系统运营和安全。了解他如何帮助 IT 发展成为一个全球性组织，成为支持公司业务增长和成功的关键推动因素。
CIO Insight: Jay, you’ve been the CIO of Tesla for two years, and you’ve been with the company for nearly three. Can you please highlight the evolution of the IT function during that time?
CIO Insight：Jay，你担任特斯拉首席信息官已经两年了，你在公司工作了近三年。您能否重点介绍一下在此期间IT职能的演变？
Jay Vijayan: The IT function in Tesla has been evolving extremely fast with the evolution of the company. The company had quarterly revenue of $39.5M in Q4 2011, but in the last quarter (Q2 2014), we reported quarterly revenue of $769.35M. Our exponential growth is not in revenue alone, but in all areas—from production volume to global sales.
Jay Vijayan：随着公司的发展，特斯拉的IT职能发展非常快。公司在2011年第四季度的季度收入为39.5M美元，但在最后一个季度（2014年第二季度），我们报告的季度收入为769.35M美元。我们的指数级增长不仅体现在收入上，还体现在从产量到全球销售的所有领域。
We have produced a car [Tesla Model S] that won all the prestigious awards in the automotive industry in its first year of production. We are continuing to grow and move faster than ever to achieve our goal of accelerating the world’s transition to electric mobility, with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars.
我们生产的汽车[特斯拉Model S]在生产的第一年就赢得了汽车行业的所有著名奖项。我们正在继续发展，并以前所未有的速度前进，以实现我们加速世界向电动汽车过渡的目标，拥有全系列越来越实惠的电动汽车。
As part of this exciting and continuing journey, the IT team built Tesla’s entire global systems network and data center infrastructure; software applications for the factory, corporate and retail network; and the necessary information security infrastructure and tools. We continue to ensure that everything we do in IT is aligned with a larger business goal. IT has evolved to a global organization and a key enabler to the global growth and success of our growing business.
作为这一令人兴奋和持续旅程的一部分，IT 团队构建了特斯拉的整个全球系统网络和数据中心基础设施;工厂、企业和零售网络的软件应用程序;以及必要的信息安全基础设施和工具。我们将继续确保我们在 IT 领域所做的一切都与更大的业务目标保持一致。IT 已发展成为一个全球性组织，是我们不断增长的业务的全球增长和成功的关键推动力。
CIO Insight: I’ve been fascinated by the fact that during a time when most IT departments chose to buy technology rather than build it, you have a bias toward building your solutions. Why is that?
CIO Insight：我很惊讶，在大多数IT部门选择购买而不是建立技术的时期,你们有偏向内部开发的倾向。为什么呢?
Vijayan: There are a few reasons why we chose to build versus buy. Here are the two core reasons:
Vijayan：我们选择建造而不是购买有几个原因。以下是两个核心原因：
Speed and Agility: As a business, we had to move extremely fast and also be agile for catalyzing a fundamental change in the automotive industry. IT function had the task to enable the business to be operating with the highest speed and agility. To do that, we needed a business operations software/ERP system that is simple, lightweight and flexible enough to satisfy our core business needs.
速度和敏捷性：作为一家企业，我们必须非常快速地行动，并且必须敏捷地催化汽车行业的根本变革。IT 职能部门的任务是使业务能够以最快的速度和敏捷性运营。为此，我们需要一个简单、轻量级和灵活的业务运营软件/ERP 系统，以满足我们的核心业务需求。
We couldn’t find such a system. Every system out there was built, not for one company or one industry, but built for several industries and tens of thousands of companies. By their nature, they are heavyweight, with functionality to satisfy all the needs of the world and additional bells and whistles. They are not very fast and not very flexible. So we went ahead and built one ourselves to satisfy our core needs.
我们找不到这样的系统。每个系统都是为一家公司或一个行业构建的，而是为多个行业和数以万计的公司构建的。就其本质而言，它们是重量级的，具有满足世界所有需求的功能和额外的花里胡哨的功能。它们不是很快，也不是很灵活。因此，我们继续自己建造一个以满足我们的核心需求。
Seamless Vertical Integration: Elon’s [Elon Musk, Tesla’s Co-Founder, CEO and Product Architect] vision is to build a vertically integrated organization where information flow happens seamlessly across departments and where we have a closed feedback loop to our customers. By doing this, we can provide the best possible product, service and overall experience to our customers in the fastest way possible, while also operating efficiently as a business.
无缝垂直一体化:伊隆(Elon Musk,特斯拉联合创始人、CEO兼产品总设计师)的愿景是建立一个垂直一体化的组织,信息可以在部门之间无缝流动,我们与客户之间有闭环反馈。通过这种方式,我们可以以最快的速度为客户提供最好的产品、服务和整体体验,同时作为一个业务高效运营。
To bring this vision to life, we had to have simple and central business operations software that could connect all departments and enable information flow seamlessly across departments. Again, we couldn’t find one software program in the market that satisfied this need.
为了实现这一愿景，我们必须拥有简单而集中的业务运营软件，该软件可以连接所有部门并实现跨部门的信息无缝流动。同样，我们在市场上找不到一个满足这种需求的软件程序。
Traditionally, companies buy best-of-breed software for one or more business functions and then spend enormous amount of energy, resources and money to integrate, manage and maintain it. The information flow is not smooth or seamless because many times these applications do not talk to each other easily. So we ended up building one.
传统上，公司为一个或多个业务功能购买同类最佳的软件，然后花费大量的精力、资源和金钱来集成、管理和维护它。信息流不是平滑或无缝的，因为很多时候这些应用程序不容易相互通信。所以我们最终建造了一个。
CIO Insight: How do you ensure that the systems integrate with one another and that they can be refreshed and ultimately retired when necessary?CIO Insight：您如何确保系统相互集成，并在必要时进行更新并最终停用？
Vijayan: First of all, we removed several discrete software applications across the company and replaced them with functionality from our in-house central ERP business application. So the amount of integration we needed to do has been very little. Any integration we build is developed in the simplest way possible, but with necessary controls and compliance mechanisms to maintain data integrity and seamless flow. We use lightweight open-source middleware to integrate as necessary.
Vijayan：首先，我们删除了整个公司的几个离散软件应用程序，并用我们内部中央ERP业务应用程序中的功能取而代之。因此，我们需要做的集成量非常少。我们构建的任何集成都是以最简单的方式开发的，但具有必要的控制和合规机制，以保持数据完整性和无缝流程。同时我们根据需要使用轻量级开源中间件进行集成。