March 26, 2001, 4:17 PM — Waking up in the morning and looking forward to getting back to the technical challenges of your work is one of the most potent sources of job satisfaction. For technologists, that means intricate projects that amaze and awe.
The respect and appreciation from the business side for information technology's contribution to success are what employers with hot projects offer their IT staffs.
"Your Web site is only as good as the product that ends up inside the customer's house," says Roseann Lucas, a technical delivery project manager at Electronic Data Systems Corp. in Des Moines, Iowa. "We want to be the engine that's powering the action behind the scenes of the glamour of the Web site." Lucas says her team intends to have a new order-management system available by late summer or early fall to clients who sell merchandise online or through catalogs.
"It gives them the capability to interact with the end consumer online and in real time, through a consumer response or call center as well as in the e-commerce realm," Lucas explains.
Being part of that kind of technology, taking it to its limits and gliding on to the next generation attracts the top talent and keeps them happy. Vendors like EDS, Intel Corp. and NCR Corp. - all on the list of Best Places for Hot Projects - are in the business of staying on the bleeding edge, creating the technology that industry runs on.
Lucas joined EDS's 80,000 IT employees via an acquisition in 1991. Since then, she has made her way through a variety of projects in what Dan Ward, director of organizational resource planning, describes as a matrix, or lattice, of job opportunities.
At Plano, Texas-based EDS, IT professionals can find out what skills they need to join a particular team, get the training and let the company know when they're ready to move ahead. "When you meet the criteria, you move up," says Lucas. "You choose when you are ready."
Technologists are also taking their place at the table for business-management decisions. With a full appreciation for the importance of technology issues comes greater opportunities for IT to participate on the business side.
Rapid Deployment
Intel's IT staff had to be ready when its e-commerce investment went from zero to $1 billion per month in six months. "It's a combination of really smart people, disciplined management, a strong team ethic, the ability to apply resources where we need them and a culture that lets people switch gears rapidly," says Doug Busch, Intel's vice president of IT.
At Intel, IT is consulting on new projects like virtual private networking, load balancing and Secure Sockets Layer acceleration products for e-commerce. The close connection to Intel's business strategy gives IT constant feedback on how the products impact Intel's ability to deliver in the marketplace.
George Moakley now leads a team of 16 as director of enterprise architecture in a lab spun off three years ago from IT. "We anticipate the kinds of business systems that will be built in the strategic time frame so we can understand how to make Intel products the best possible products for those businesses," he says.
Moakley will be tripling his team in the coming months, looking first within Intel's ranks. Then he will cast around for outside talent who can inject new perspectives, whether fresh from graduate school or other parts of the industry.
"We think there's going to be some interesting development in the third generation of e-business and how that maps to finer-grained enterprise application integration and the whole outsource solution provider space, like ASPs and ISPs," Moakley says.
Internally, technologists are coping with the conductivity issues of a rapid rollout to provide Internet service to 70,000 PCs in employees' homes. Intel employees spend about two years at any given job. "You are encouraged to broaden your skills and visibility," says Kevin D. Small, acting human resources manager for IT at Intel.
With open encouragement across business functions and IT, Intel's technologists move into a wide range of opportunities, from Web hosting to Intel Architecture Laboratories and the IA64 Venture Capital Fund, which makes equity investments in start-ups.
"Intel makes a point of cross-pollinating, moving people between business units and IT," giving everyone the opportunity to benefit from other kinds of experience, Moakley says.
"We're really proud of the fact that IT is the development pool for people to develop skills that are incredibly valuable to other parts of the company," says Busch.
