Life at GE : Careers : GE

What are the best aspects of your current job?

The greatest part of my current job is the huge opportunity and excitement we have to help revolutionize IT Service Management processes across the GE businesses. We have been working since late 2010 to bring a new Service Management platform (ServiceNow) into GE Corporate IT to significantly improve our capabilities, flexibility, and speed to market for IT processes. We hope to be able to offer this platform to the businesses either in partnership with our corporate processes or as a Center of Excellence for running business instances of the ServiceNow platform. It is an exciting time to be in this area of IT.

What are the best parts about working at GE?

The diversity of opportunities to further your career and broaden your skillset. I have held several very different roles within IT infrastructure areas, ranging from datacenter and facility management to network to compute to applications. Within GE, we are fortunate to be able to make these technology/business and focus group shifts without leaving the comfort of the company. There are few companies in the world that can compete with this ability to give employees such a range of intellectual challenges.

How did your background/previous work experience prepare you for your current role?

My current role is focused on delivering a platform for IT to manage IT infrastructure and IT services. In the last nine years, I've held various design roles, operations roles and relationship roles across multiple technology disciplines, so I have been a customer of the platform I'm now supporting and delivering functionality for.

That gives me a unique perspective as to how my decisions will impact my customers. What might seem like a good solution on paper to an application developer doesn't necessarily translate to an improved experience for the end users, so truly understanding your customer's perspective is invaluable.

What is the most challenging project you've worked on at GE?

One of the more challenging projects I've worked on in recent years was the recent compliance remediation efforts across GE Capital. GE Capital is now being regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, and with new regulations, a lot of our operating practices need to be revamped for the increased regulatory scrutiny they are receiving.

The biggest challenge came in interpreting a complex but immature set of regulations and understanding how to implement controls on an evolving target of requirements. This really challenged my team and I to think creatively and ultimately imagine, research and consider all possible directions that the regulation might go and design a solution that was flexible, scalable and, of course, secure while not adversely impacting the critical operating procedures of the business.

What are the top technical skills that you take pride in possessing and/or still draw upon for your job?

Problem analysis is a skill that transcends all roles. The ability to drill into areas, have the confidence to ask the tough questions, and deal with uncomfortable answers is critical for any leader to truly be successful.

I've also always been a bit of a techno geek, so I like to understand the technology I'm supporting and spend a significant portion of my time making sure I truly understand the core components of any platform we bring in.

That deeper dive has given me a significant base of technical skills to draw upon, ranging from power infrastructure through detailed networking routing up through the compute tech stack to database tuning, application development principles, and user interface design.

Those two areas coupled with strong relationship management and leadership abilities make up the skills I constantly draw upon in my roles.

What is the best piece of career advice you can offer IT folks embarking on a technical career at GE?

Change can be quick, but it shouldn't be rushed.

I've switched between technology areas during the past 12 years and have often moved into a role where my team has greater domain expertise than I do. As a result, I've learned that building relationships and trust within your team early on is critical. I've also learned that patience and planning are virtues. It is vitally important to take time to learn how and why things operate the way they do before you look to make improvements. What might look like an obvious flaw on Day 1 might turn out to be a perfect strategy on Day 30.

Many leaders want to put their stamp on a team in the first 30/60/90 days and often make radical changes without truly understanding the history of how the team got to where they are. My philosophy over the last few years, unless there are fundamental failure points, has been to listen and experience how the team functions, make tactical fixes to pain points, and then develop a long-term strategy based on key performance indicators. Feeding a few hungry wolves is quick - solving world hunger takes time.