Rotation Spotlight: Smart Grid

Juan, 3rd Rotation IMLPOne of our Energy IMLPs, Juan, worked with the Transmission & Distribution IT team to design and provision the hardware, network, and software to support the first European Smart Grid Demo Lab, a fully featured demonstration room that shows the GE Smart Grid product portfolio. The lab was launched at the end of November 2009.

To enable this demo lab, Juan and the IT team designed a dedicated product network environment that hosts the whole demo. This network interconnects over 20 PC clients, 2 virtualized servers, a virtual center server (for centralized administration) and a shared clustered storage area of 3 Terabytes that is accessed by all the devices present in the room. Remote access is also available so all the teams involved can access and configure their clients and virtual servers remotely.

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T is for turkey (and technology)

Here is a little story about how technology and the internet saved my thanksgiving.

This year, my cousins (all 3 of them) and I decided to take 'take over' our annual family Thanksgiving dinner. During planing, we generated a list of what we wanted to make for dinner and divide it among each other. As T-day grew closer emails started going out asking for others to pick up ingredients that were not available in our local grocery stores.

Finally Thanksgiving was here! And everybody had what they needed...except me. I was missing some ripe plantains (which somebody forgot to pickup for me...). Being in New Jersey... I had no clue where to go and some family members were 'less than helpful' since most of us are not from the area or just moved there recently. 3 hours until dinner is served and I'm missing ingredient! What do I do?!

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Geek 2.0 is Chic

Geek 2.0 > Geek 1.0

We're all aware of the common stereotypes of "geekdom," as personified in the photo on the left.

As a techy, I prefer "Geek 2.0," similar to how I prefer Web 2.0 applications over Web 1.0 technologies, as some things improve over time (cheese & technology included).

Collaborative technologies (social networking, blogs, microblogging) are most known as our external friends like Facebook and Twitter, but there is a corporate "flavor" of these fun technologies that can also be harnessed to assist in driving up our productivity during the work day.

Known as Enterprise 2.0 (or Enterprise Social Software), the integration of Web 2.0 techniques within an organization helps to deliver a rich user experience, simplified global collaboration and knowledge management.

Take GE Docs for example, which was featured on the blog a few months back- it's a great example of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

And GE is no different- and as IMLPs we often get to have a role in integrating these new technologies and ideas into both our projects and overall strategic plans for the business. It was just yesterday when I learned about cool business-specific applications that are being developed for our blackberries!

A GE Adventure.

Ever wanted to see what's going on inside of the GE Global Research Center, or take a trip to the top of a wind turbine?

A new blog, GE Adventure,  has been launched that focuses on a "series of field trips through GE," so you can read about a variety of  adventures.

My favorites include this post about a wind turbine visit- where the bloggers made a parachute out of a plastic bag and dropped it off the 260' high turbine. it even has a video. To check out a photo gallery of GE wind turbines, check out this page.

Or this post, that shows a few antique GE ads, and shows the original text,  “Really, you can’t blame her. Who wouldn’t drag her friends out into the kitchen to show off her new General Electric? There it stands, gleaming white, strong as a safe, incredibly quiet … the envy of all who see it.”

The blog also discusses some of the cool new technologies that folks at the GRC have been working on, including nanotechnology, oled lighting, and more.

The blog is still pretty new, so check back for more first hand information compiled by the bloggers!

Aviation Wiki

One of the best parts about being an IMLP is the fun side projects we get to work on, in addition to our actual rotations. GE managers often pull us in to work on technical solutions due to our generation's fresh perspective and affinity for technology.

Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to work on just such a project. The CIO of Aviation asked a group of IMLPs to recommend a tool for keeping track of all the complicated processes in the whole IM organization. Naturally, we decided a wiki would be the best option.

Next we compared several wiki platforms, chose the free and easy-to-use tool already being used at GE, and started working on a prototype. Then came the fun part: tracking down information from all over Aviation and compiling it in one place. Finally, last week we presented our recommendation and prototype to the CIO and her staff - talk about great exposure!

IMLPs are often brought in on side projects like this to build web sites, collaboration tools, web applications, forms, surveys, and other tools to be used within the business. Not only are they a lot of fun to work on, sometimes they can have a big and lasting impact on the way things are done here at GE!