Taggart works for the chief technology officer, who heads one of the few global organizations within GM, and is responsible for the global practices of standards and architecture. He works closely with subsidiary organizations such as Holden in Australia, which he says gives him a "very nice horizontal view of the company, both in terms of all of the standards that we want to have within IT, as well as trying to move along the practice of architecture".

His work to date has paid off big time. Speaking before arriving in Australia for BTELL's annual EA conference in July, Taggart told CIO that developing a general architectural plan has helped GM reduce computing complexity by trimming the number of applications in use at the company from 7000 to 3000 and has contributed to saving $1US billion annually for the past five years. (See "GM's Cure for Complexity", , where GM's CTO Tony Scott outlines how his IT group achieves simplicity and ROI by mapping business functionalities and requirements to its IT systems.)

"That was a big thing in terms of our cost reduction, and now with this technique we're mapping our application portfolio against the business model that we've developed of General Motors," he says.

Last year Taggart co-founded the Enterprise Architecture Interest Group (EAIG), whose members include Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Booz Allen Hamilton, Oakland University, Sandia National Laboratories and the Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement, a group that promotes the Zachman Framework as a starting point for describing enterprise systems. EAIG ( www.eaig.org) was formed to fill a void by standardizing EA definitions and practice and to help companies develop and share tips on building well-structured IT systems, study ways to measure the benefits of formalizing enterprise architecture and develop value models for use by EAIG members and their organizations.

At the time of writing, the group planned to release its first deliverable, a set of 12 meta-models intended to be used as architectural building blocks to create any desired model of any business, in September or as soon as possible after that date, following feedback from some key thought leaders. This first deliverable, which Taggart says essentially amounts to a business architecture, was built around the Zachman Framework. "These 12 models represent a comprehensive set of reusable building blocks to represent any organization or any enterprise," Taggart says.

To make all of its intangibles explicit, GM has developed the Intellectual Capital Maturity Model, and will shortly begin testing the effectiveness of those basic building blocks in capturing intellectual capital. The model is the outcome of extensive work by Taggart in exploring fundamental techniques for modelling a business, and can be used to categories tangible or intangible assets - processes, components, solutions and organization, according to whether they are unrecognized, recognized, chaotic, organized, assetized, managed, valued or monetized.

GM has also developed a concept called Business on a Page, which lets it show the goals, major functions and major pieces of information the organization manages and maintains to provide performance functions on a single chart, allowing businesspeople to see their business at a glance, take ownership of it and be aligned around it. Taggart says these are proving very popular with businesspeople, and particularly with HR, who see Business on a Page as a great way to begin training for new employees.

Creating enterprise architectural blueprints can also help companies cut costs with outsourcing, Taggart says. "It helps you understand what can or can't, and should or shouldn't, be outsourced."