Seeing GE Aviation's Work Take Flight

Andrew, a second rotation ITLP in Aviation, recently had the (awesome) opportunity to attend the delivery celebration for the first GEnx 787 engine delivery to Japan Airlines (JAL) last week. Here’s his account of the trip: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."

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GE Tops Forbes Rankings

Have you heard the news? Yes, GE has been named the Happiest Company for Young Professionals. According to CareerBliss, who interviewed more than 200,000 young employees, GE ranks first for happiness and sense of reward from our daily job.  In other words, every day we wake up and we’re happy to go to work and make an impact at one of the biggest companies in the world.

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.

Team Building (and Fun!) at GE

GE softball leagues are a fun (and sometimes competitive!) way to mingle with your corworkersSummertime in the US is almost here, and at GE that means...softball teams are forming! Already I’ve been invited to be on two different teams, and have had to scrounge around my apartment to find my old glove. Though I’m not even remotely a good player (I haven’t really played since 8^th grade), I am excited for the opportunity to meet new people and have fun doing something with my GE friends other than our usual work.

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.

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Variety: The Spice of ITLP Life

One thing that is constant for all ITLPs is variety, especially in Europe. There are so many different people you work with, such a ramge of projects to work on, and so many places you could go.

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.

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Bring Your Own Device: Is It Worth It?

Security comes with a new face every year. The acceptance of security as a dynamic state is crucial for the protection of any enterprise and its assets. A famous philosopher once quipped, "It is in the nature of things that when one tries to avoid one danger, another is always encountered". Let's take a look at the infamous Stuxnet malware, for example; the malware was able to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program within a network requiring rigorous security screenings including biometrics ID and no internet access. This begs the question: Is IT security better off by treating security as a game of perfect information where strategists should be valued and emphasized more over tools and skills, which the opposition is most likely equally matched (think chess)? Threats to a company, after all, can both be internal and external.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”.

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