Interview: Eric Ottaway, General Manager, Brooklyn Brewery

This interview is part of ITworld's regular "How I got here" series which focuses on the career path of successful IT professionals.

Eric Ottaway didn't start out as an IT'er-but he quickly discovered that getting experience in IT and how it could help business not only would build his IT skills, but would ultimately pave the way to a General Manager's position at the Brooklyn Brewery. Ottaway credits his work in IT as a "door opener" to understanding key drivers behind business processes that enable him today as a General Manager to run a highly effective brewery operation.

How did you start your career? I began my career in a management consulting practice in Boston, with a background in Economics and Political Science. This is where I had my first IT experience. In one project, I was working with a client that provided hospice care services, and we found that the main impediment to their operations was that their IT infrastructure didn't match up well with their business. At the time, a lot of folks were moving away from mainframes, so I spent two years on a project team redesigning their entire system and working with outside software developers to develop a customized solution using what was then cutting edge client-server technology. I became interested in how technology enables business processes.

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