Life at GE : Careers : GE
I love the opportunity to be directly involved in product development and owning a portion of the product suite that will be used directly by consumers.
GE hires some of the best and brightest people in the world. The fact that I can interact with such a talent pool keeps me challenged individually and makes me know I can tackle the toughest of problems to make our business better.
My years in infrastructure grounded me on what enterprise architecture truly is. As we develop products that will need to sit within the IT infrastructure, having that perspective allows me to ensure we are creating sound solutions. My year spent helping marketing and our consumer experience program provided me the proper consumer perspective needed to help balance the pull between consumer needs and enterprise requirements.
Implementing an enterprise architecture process for GE Appliances & Lighting has been one of my most difficult projects because of the massive culture change needed to make it successful. Instead of pushing such a change from the top, we decided to grow the culture organically by providing an open communication environment so people could see the value of the enterprise level discussions and structure and then actively participate rather than being told to participate. This approach has taken a lot of time and effort to ensure momentum is maintained and sustained. We are well into our journey, but have not made it part of our everyday life yet.
The skills and experiences I take pride in and use indirectly today are the "street cred" skills I gained when I was early in my career. Coding, process development, being on-call, learning right and wrong, and having the scars to prove it in a number of technologies are the skills that I think prepared me to lead and think bigger picture with more validity. Having to do the grunt work on some of my own implementations allows for me to architect and strategic plan better, because I know what impacts certain decisions can have on the day-to-day efforts of those implementing and supporting the systems I work with today.
I received the best piece of advice from a manager, and I continue to pass it on to my mentees and employees today: GE pays you to take risks and try new things. If we didn't want you to challenge things and question things, we wouldn't hire you. Continue to push and find better ways to do things. Risk isn't always bad.
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