Life at GE : Careers : GE

What are the best aspects of your current job?

I lead the EMEA IT organization, and my focus is on enabling a sustainable business transformation for GE Lighting. This includes providing strategic decisions that impact the entire business: how we go to market, the selling model, a renewed product portfolio, and the way we deliver solutions and products in an increasingly regulated environment.

Working directly and closely with the global IT leadership team and the EMEA business leaders gives me significant insight into the challenges our global business and IT organization faces operationally, tactically and strategically. This requires continuous learning, critical thinking, and the ability to engage people to be able to respond to these challenges in an effective way.

What are the best parts about working at GE?

The diversity of people and talents. I like to meet and work with people from different cultures and countries and to meet people with unique backgrounds and experiences. This diversity provides me with frequent opportunities for personal and professional growth.

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

My career has been built through continuous learning. My role as an ITLP gave me many opportunities to understand what GE is, how GE works, and how to navigate within this complex, dynamic organization. Being in an IT operations leadership role helped me embrace an operational mindset and get first-hand experience in challenging situations while having significant budgetary responsibility.

Later, I moved to a global leadership role in infrastructure where I had both clients and direct reports in three poles. This was a fantastic learning opportunity around cultural differences, people and performance management, virtual working environments and time management. Leading the Commercial IT organization for Consumer & Industrial EMEA helped me improve client management skills and further develop my ability to manage employees spread across nine countries in Europe and India.

More recently, I got the chance to complete an assignment in the U.S., which, besides giving me the opportunity to lead a global organization, contributed to my constant learning in cultural awareness and influencing skills. I truly believe each of the above experiences contributed to developing my skill sets and provides a strong base for me to be successful in my current and future roles.

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

One example that comes to mind is a Business Objects upgrade where we underestimated the risk of being the first in the market to embrace a new version, which subsequently required continuous 24/7 support just post go-live. This provided important learning for the future. Another project was when we upgraded an old SAP R2 system to a new R3 version. This three-year project required the reengineering and reimplementation of a significant amount of processes on SAP and surrounding systems. This was a fantastic experience on how to create successful business processes and manage change through an entire business.

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

Technical awareness and hands-on experience are critical when setting and executing an IT strategy. The most significant technical learning curve for me occurred when I had the technical lead role for Lighting EMEA IT operations for SAP and Business Intelligence. This opportunity came early in my career and gave me invaluable insight into technical challenges from day-to-day operations up to complete system upgrades. I continuously build upon this experience when defining reliability, simplification or collaboration strategies, also when designing and measuring the technical career path within my organization.

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

Effective leaders possess excellent communication and influencing skills. They are able to manage a complex environment and drive changes, both technically and organizationally. Becoming a successful technical expert requires having these skills, along with a superior technical attitude and hands-on experience.

The biggest challenge I see with technical experts, both on infrastructure and application platforms, is to learn the language of the users - speak and write clearly and concisely using words that everyone understands. All of us in IT need to understand the role that IT plays - from securing the business, to project execution, from simplification to collaboration - and must look and approach these as critical enablers for sustainable business changes and initiatives.