Nissan's IT Guy

In 2006, Nissan North America moved its corporate headquarters from sunny Southern California to the Music City. Naturally, state and local officials were thrilled with the global carmaker's decision to call Nashville home. The move not only enhanced Middle Tennessee's already strong automotive presence, but it also reaffirmed the Nashville area as a prime spot for corporate America to set up shop. And set up shop Nissan did—the company brought with it about 1,000 high-paying jobs and has invested more than $100 million in a new campus in Cool Springs.

But what was less obvious was the impact the relocation would have on Nashville's technology sector; for during its move East, the automaker was in the process of restructuring its IT organization, or really, as Nissan CIO Bob Greenberg puts it, "building an IT organization from scratch."

"Previously, we were outsourcing all of our IT organization, and we decided that was not effective for us, so we brought back all of the program and project management functions, all of the application and infrastructure architecture functions and all of the business analyst functions," Greenberg says.

Today, Greenberg oversees about 700 IT vendor/contract personnel on and offshore and about 300 internal IT employees—the vast majority of whom hang their hats in Middle Tennessee. But finding the talent here was not necessarily an easy task.

"We are a global company with a fairly large IT environment, and within the Nashville community, there are not that many people who have worked in large environments that have global complexity," Greenberg says. "We'd like to hire people who are already here, but depending on the job level and skill set, we may have to hire more from outside the immediate community. So, with the Nashville Technology Council, we're interested in figuring out how to increase the depth of the talent base within Nashville."

From a personnel standpoint, the reconstruction is almost complete, but the company still has business analyst and project management openings, and, of course, as the company grows, so will its needs. Fortunately though, Greenberg says attracting the talent from other states has not been all that difficult. In fact, he himself is a good poster boy for recruitment efforts. When Greenberg accepted his position with Nissan two-and-a-half years ago, he and his family lived in New Jersey, so he commuted to California. His family was California-bound before Nissan's decision to relocate put an end to those plans. If the oldest of his two daughters hadn't liked Nashville, he would have commuted from New Jersey until she graduated from high school, but she signed off on her prospective school and the city after one visit. Today, he says his family couldn't be happier, and he calls Nashville a "hidden gem." "We never expected the environment to be as diverse as it is," he says, citing a laundry list of bonuses, including friendly people, lower cost of living, less traffic, the Titans and the Predators, and a "darn good" symphony and opera.

So, when he's recruiting, he tells people not to stereotype the Music City, though mostly, he just lets the city speak for itself.

"Come take a look," he says. "There's a heck of a lot more here than you think."