Life at GE : Careers : GE
I love the visibility that my job gives me into what is happening in the business. Not just within Communications, Sales and Marketing, but across all of the Energy business segments. A few months ago, Energy's commercial leader met with the CEO of a strategy firm called Undercurrent. This CEO highlighted a study that demonstrated how individuals who were exposed to multiple functional areas, people and processes were optimally positioned to highlight opportunities for synergy. That's a great example of what I love about my job. I love that my role gives me that exposure and provides me the opportunity to build partnerships and connect similar business needs to drive cross-functional/P&L solutions.
From sustainable water solutions to more efficient and reliable power generation offerings, it's exciting to see how our company contributes to improving the living standards of many across the world. Working with the business to strategize and execute on initiatives is personally fulfilling, but connecting our individual contributions to GE's global impact is energizing.
I began my career as a consultant with a small firm where I was not only the project manager but also the business analyst, web and database designer and programmer, etc. During this time, I learned that data (how it's defined, stored, populated, and related to other data elements and systems) is critical to enabling business decisions and optimizing the customer experience. As an IT contributor, I find that it's imperative to understand the information that is within your systems, including inputs from and outputs to other systems. Know your data!
As with many IT roles and projects, my business stakeholders span multiple functional and P&L boundaries and often have competing requirements and priorities. I've learned that to create sustainable global IT solutions, it's important to streamline business processes as much as possible in order to simplify support activities, upgrades, changes to the organization, etc. Getting stakeholders to see beyond the "as-is" and into agreement on what "could be" is an art that draws upon domain knowledge, co-worker relationships, and effective influencing and facilitation skills... it's an art that I'm constantly striving to improve!
Keeping the customer experience front and center when designing solutions ... though this is not always considered a technical skill, I find it critical to formally document and plan for an intuitive, holistic user experience. I've learned this from previous projects where customers encounter confusing interactions in an otherwise robust solution, become frustrated, and, therefore, do not return.
Strive to learn as much as you can about our people, customers, suppliers and business operations, including how IT systems enable operations. This will give you the background to ask questions or facilitate discussions to ensure solutions meet the obvious and not so obvious business needs.
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