GE Employee: Meet Our People: Profiles Grady

Just twelve years ago, Grady Summers was interning at a GE’s Transportation’s diesel engine plant in Grove City, PA. Now, he leads the company’s global information security efforts as its Chief Information Security Officer. He attributes his career success to the experience he received in different roles at GE, each one a springboard for the next.

After his first internship, he spent a summer working at GE Fanuc in Charlottesville, VA. "Both of my internships gave me incredible experience for someone at my level at the time," said Grady. "I got to lead some great projects with actual budgets—it was the real-life application to what I was learning in my classes."

Grady then joined IMLP at GE Corporate, where he rotated through technology roles in sourcing, accounts payable, finance, and the Corporate Initiatives Group. After that, he led the deployment of a new single-sign on technology across the business. Next, he took on his biggest project yet: overhauling GE.com.

He says he has worked on dozens of interesting projects since then, but he still looks back on the intense redesign of GE.com as one of his most exciting. "This project had it all--new technology, great people, many different teams pulling together for a common goal, and a really tight timeline!" said Grady. "We pulled off a complete overhaul--new hardware, new software, new design--in an extremely short amount of time. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun."

After tackling GE.com, Grady pursued an interest in the security field, becoming an application security leader at Corporate and then later Corporate Information Security Lead. Just a few years after that, he was promoted to Infrastructure Leader of the Corporate business unit before taking on his current role of GE's CISO.

Each role prepared Grady well for the next. "The SSO roll-out gave me web app experience, which helped qualify me to take on InsideGE and GE.com. That app experience lined me up to be effective as an app security leader. The entry-level security job prepared me to take the security leadership role. It was a great team leadership experience that qualified me for the Corporate Infrastructure Leader role, and my infrastructure experience helped make me more effective as the CISO."