I joined GE two months ago as an ITLP intern in Gurgaon, India. I must say on the very first day itself I could sense the excellence that flows in the veins of this corporate giant. The introduction was nothing but a joy-ride. The perfection of the entire process was so scintillating that it made my transition from college to corporate very smooth.Shubha Brata Roy looks back as his internship at GE Energy comes to an end this Friday

The project I got for my ITLP internship was equally challenging from the GE standards. But I found this to be a magical place, just like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, where you always get help when you are looking for it. And so are the magical people around here; with great abilities and great responsibilities, but still down to earth. Working for GE is a passion for these people, and every morning they return with a goal to make a difference, where it actually matters. They work for society where the society needs them and at the same time make money for the shareholders who vouch for them.

One thing that has fascinated me about this company is its integrity. While reading through Jack Welch's books, I used to wonder how a company as big and as diverse as GE could sustain in the business without compromising on its integrity. I mean how can a company which does business with almost every other country in this globe and is exposed to so many diverse cultures, stay above the social and political perils? But it was only when I spoke to the leaders in person, I could realize that this is something which they feel proud of in this company. And this pride gives them strength to fight any distractions that comes their way. So being an ITLP is an honour for a candidate to take this legacy forward.

Our case study dealt with sales and performance data from GE Healthcare devices, such as x-ray machinesOur teams were tasked with designing a business intelligence reporting system. We had to integrate different data sources and standardize and design reports. As with our previous classes, our final presentation included a detailed project plan, financial analyses, and, as usual, a tough question and answer session with our GE reviewer. Our reviewer happened to be an ITLP alum, so we knew there was no sneaking anything past her. But our presentation went well, and our team passed the course. Our next stop: China for Senior Bootcamp, where we will be working to implement the system we designed.

Distance learning classes have proven to be more beneficial to me than I had thought they could be. They serve to hone our presentation skills, as every interaction with our teammates and instructors is via phone. These are skills that I rarely (if ever) had to use in school, so it’s been very useful to get more instruction on virtual presentations.

Distance learning classes also help to keep the larger ITLP class connected. Our teams combine all businesses and regions, so someone from GE Healthcare in the US might work with teammates from GE Aviation in Europe and GE Energy in India. It’s always good to keep building your network and keep your finger on the pulse of the larger ITLP program, and these classes are a great way to do that.

The first 787 delivery to JAL complete with GEnx engines

For my second rotation, I am located at the GE Aviation site in Yakima, Washington. The main landing gear systems for the GEnx 787, among other actuation systems, are made by GE right here in Yakima.  And the bigger deal is the engine on the wing: the GEnx.

We drove over to Seattle for the day from Yakima and started by attending the celebration lunch at Boeing.  We got to hear from the program leaders from Boeing, GE, and Japan Airlines.  It really gave me a good perspective on our customers, the airframer Boeing, and the airline JAL.  I have always heard that Asian culture is really built around strong relationships and trust, which was very apparent to me.  The GE and Boeing Program leaders were talking about the dinners, and gatherings that they had with JAL leading up to the delivery.  All GE, JAL, and Boeing program leaders were wearing Kimonos that were given to them by JAL. 

While it may have seemed like the relationship was strong among the three companies, there are certainly some challenges. There are going to be heavy demands placed on these planes, which will be relied upon for Boston to Japan flights.  If for any reason there needs to be unexpected maintenance in Boston there will not be another 787 sitting around ready to pick up the slack.  At worst case, they will have to fly in another plane all the way from Japan.  Our customers truly depend upon the quality, durability, and safety of our product.

One of the vintage planes that Andrew had a chance to sit in

In between the celebration lunch and the actual takeoff we got to see the John Sessions airplane collection at Paine Field.  John Sessions is an individual who has an incredible passion for flying and aircraft.  He has quite a collection of vintage airplanes, among them a P-51B which saw combat in WWII; he said there are only 5 of these in the world.  Since they were all his planes (and he was a very cool guy) he let us climb around inside the planes and even sit in the cockpits."

But that wasn’t the only award recently received by GE. Forbes posted another article revealing that once again, GE ranks in first place in the annual Hay Group survey “Best Companies for Leadership” (read more here and see our post from last year for more details). This makes it five times in six years has topped the list.

If you combine the two results, you may have an idea of what it means to be a young professional working at GE. While you grow professionally and personally, you wake up every day happy to go to work where friends and colleagues welcome you in a collaborative and open environment.  As an ITLP, you’ll realize how your skills can impact the projects and the business you are working on. You can influence small changes in the way people work, making them save time and effort. People rely on you for all the IT questions they may have and will ask you how you can make their life easier or solve a complex problem. In your role you will increase productivity of your business and you will bring accuracy and automation in their daily calculations, from financial data and reports for leadership to engineering calculations showing gas turbine efficiency. In order to give you experience and expertise you may have the opportunity to change location, business, and perspective every six months, opening up your horizons and gaining business acumen. You will do all of this in a great community of peers who are there to help, and together with you, make the program better. At the end of the program, you will realize how the business and the projects you worked on improved; you will realize that you were part of it, contributing to make GE an even better company.

GE softball leagues are a fun (and sometimes competitive!) way to mingle with your corworkers

GE softball leagues exist at several of our locations, pitting teams made up of different departments and functions against each other. At both locations where I’ve lived so far, there is an annual team made up of IT employees, ITLPs and IT interns that I’ve been able to join. The teams span a wide variety of softball playing ability, but everyone is encouraging and mostly focused on just having a good time. There is some competition though – at the end of the summer, the top teams compete in the playoffs to determine an overall champion.

Softball isn’t the only opportunity for having fun at GE either. In the last 6 months, I’ve also been invited to participate in two different run/walk races, help plan a game day for the IT organization, bake snacks for an international lunch, and go on a cruise down the Hudson River. Whether it’s a GE-wide programs, team events, or individuals finding exciting things to do in the area, there are always opportunities to meet people and have some fun.

This March I started my 2nd rotation and it couldn’t be more different from my first. I am working in a different office, with a different environment, with different people, in a different area of the business, in a completely different role.

It is this variety that makes ITLP so interesting and gives you an unparalleled level of experience.

Business Intelligence (BI) rotations are a great way to learn about the business, especially on first rotationI was very excited when I started ITLP but had little to no idea of what to expect - I was lucky to have my first rotation as a project manager in Business Intelligence (BI). In this role I learnt about how the business uses metrics to improve practices, provide solid information, and the enormous coordination of data this needs. I was working with people in America, Sweden, and India which posed certain challenges but taught me much about managing projects internationally.

I worked on 3 main projects during my time in BI and they all helped me learn more about different  stakeholders. My first concentrated on service needs of the BI team, which helped me learn more about how the team was structured and the availability of cross-business functions such as the Global Application Management Services. My next project allowed me to connect to the customers of BI; these were internal customers in finance, sales etc. who used our services.

The final part of my rotation I was able to bring together what I had learnt previously to complete  the upgrade for our most-used tool. I worked with our team to coordinate the timing and resources. Then worked with our customers to arrange training. I was also able to learn more about areas such as testing, plus connect with our customers on more of a personal level.

As consumer technologies become more powerful, employees will often want to use their own mobile device work work purposes. How should that affect security policy?

With increasing popularity in initiatives like BYOD and BYID, IT departments are constantly trying to find the balance between openness and security. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) seems to sit at one end of the spectrum and Bring Your own ID (BYID), on the other end. Both initiatives are part of a larger consumerization of IT trend that has been gripping the corporate environment since the advent of smart personal devices and cloud services. BYID may seem to pose a security threat, at face value, but it’s actually both convenient and provides a stronger security environment than a one tier authentication method. With the continued growth of cloud services, identity needs to be taken off of users’ plates via delegated authentication using such standards like OAuth and OpenID. Imagine a use case where you provide a service online to users either on a trial basis and/or full subscription. If a user only wants to use your service on a trial basis, he or she does not have to create a login to temporarily access your service but should be able to instead use a social network account, for example, to access a trial account. When it comes time to upgrade to a full subscription, the user will then have the option to create a login specific to your site unless you choose to continuously leverage a 3rd party vendor for authentication purposes. This type of authentication brokering should be embraced more by companies of all sizes and is even more applicable for business partnerships. It becomes a true partnership when two different businesses can use their respective credentials to access non-sensitive data on each other’s sites, a capability that many GE employees benefit from today with external applications within the Benefits site, for example. 

At the other end, BYOD seems like a good idea at face value but the openness that is achieved comes at a high cost to personal privacy and enables personally-owned devices as easier entry points into a company. With BYOD, one of the biggest threats is phishing within an application with a good install base. It’s important to remember that when it comes to choosing mobile applications, there is no central vetting service and users have to rely on reviews and the “reputation” of developers. This is a serious threat to corporate networks. Although there are methods such as network access control (NAC) or virtualization that can help in protecting a company’s network from intrusion via personally-owned devices, one big disadvantage is in the remote capabilities arena. For example, company-owned devices can be easily encrypted or wiped clean in the event of a lost or stolen device; but, with employee-owned devices, this policy poses a challenge and has far reaching ramifications into privacy. The language from the GE Personal Mobile Device End User Agreement spells it out clear that personal data is indistinguishable from company data and can be audited or remotely deleted if there is ever a perceived or realized compromise to GE. “Be aware that both GE Information and personal information or files stored on your Personal Device may be impacted by GE’s incident response procedures, up to and including remote deletion…Your Personal Device must at all times to meet current GE technical specifications…These GE technical specifications…may change from time to time. In the event your Personal Device fails to meet such updated specifications… Be aware that personal information or files stored on your Personal Device may be impacted by GE’s disconnection or information removal procedures”.

Volunteer events are one great way to get out of the office and give back to the community, as well as strengthen the ITLP network

As many of the posts on this blog attest, our rotations are fun and offer great opportunities to grow; however, there are ways to get involved in the strong and vibrant community and culture of GE and the IT Leadership Program beyond your rotational assignment, and that is though committees. This blog and other social media are are the perfect example; the blog is run and developed entirely by program members, as are the Facebook, Google+, and Twitter accounts. There are also committees to help with recruitment, engage alumni, promote networking, and the list goes on. These experiences allow you as a program member to get experience you otherwise wouldn’t have with a traditional rotation assignment. I took the chance to be involved from my first rotation and have had wonderful experiences. Besides contributing to this blog, I was the Editor for an internal newsletter distributed to our Senior Leadership, current program participants, and alumni. It gave me the chance to extend my network to others outside of my immediate peer group and even outside the ITLP program. Being involved with the internal community not only provides other avenues for personal development, but it also contributes to making the program culture stronger.

The other way to be involved is with the external community via service and and other events. Service and corporate citizenship is encouraged at GE. The GE Capital ITLPs have been part of at least one service project each rotation, and usually more. It is great to get out in the communities we work in and give back. My favorite have been helping with educational programs, both teaching and mentoring at local schools. This last rotation I am helping a few of the Capital ITLPs in conjunction with the some of the Financial and Risk management program members embarking on a trek to Nicaragua to help build schools in some of the more remote villages. It has been a privilege to be part of this global effort and know we are making a difference in other people’s lives.

Although I have coded in both Java and PHP before, I’ve never used an MVC-oriented framework such as Zend before. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, which is a software architectural pattern that splits an application into 3 parts: business logic (model), presentation (view), and an intermediary interface that bridges the two (controller). From an application engineering perspective, this allows multiple groups with different areas of focus to simultaneously develop for an application. A team of frontend developers may focus exclusively on the presentation layer, while those familiar with database logic will contribute to the backend business logic layer. Not only that, this approach also enhances maintainability and reduces code duplication. If tweaks to the user interface are needed, or if the structure of a database table changes, a developer would not have to sift through lines of irrelevant code to make the appropriate changes. As such, MVC has become the standard in the design of modern web applications. 

New Rotation:

The 7FA Heavy Duty Gas Turbine being built in GE's Greenville plantIn my new rotation, I will be working on capturing a full as-is picture of all of our shop floor systems in the Greenville Gas Turbine plant, looking for any quick-fix or short-term project opportunities in the current systems, and ultimately creating a Fit/Gap analysis for a new shop floor system replacement. Currently, I am working on gathering all the information required for the as-is picture through detailed interviews with each of the manufacturing cells on the shop floor. This is a way bigger task than I originally thought... there are just so many people to talk to and so much information out there about the systems being used that we don’t know about. I have learned so much already about how the individual cells are using the systems and have even identified some possible short-term projects, and I am only a few weeks into the interviewing process. As the interviews continue, the amount of information and number of opportunities for improvement will only increase. There is clearly a lot for me to do in these next 5 months, but it is also clear that my rotation could have a huge impact in how our shop floor systems are used plant-wide (not just in Greenville but in our other Gas and Steam Turbine Plants as well), so I am very driven to work as hard as I can to deliver.

This rotation is very different from my first ITLP rotation in almost all aspects. In this rotation, my team is more local and I am working with people in-person on a daily basis as opposed to my last rotation where the majority of my team was global. The technologies and systems, the business processes, the basic nature of what I’m working on, are entirely different and new. This is one of the best parts about being on program: while I really enjoyed my first rotation, I get to experience something completely different for my second rotation and really enjoy it too!