4th Rotation - Finish Strong

Last Monday, I started my fourth and final rotation of IMLP. Last Wednesday, I received my GE iPhone.

Yes, you read that right. For the next six months, I'll be working in GE Aviation Services in an area known as Intelligent Services. This team looks for innovative ways to provide value to customers of our Aviation Services business - for instance, a shipping company with an engine being repaired in one of our service shops, or an airline needing to purchase spare parts.

The main product that we're looking to offer in this area is known as myEngines - a suite of mobile applications that can be accessed around the globe to receive and transmit Services data in real-time.

Along with several of GE Healthcare's initiatives and GE Energy's SmartGrid program, myEngines is part of a broader GE effort to move IT out of the back office (supporting our internal business processes) and offer IT products directly to our customers.

The myEngines suite will include lots of different application modules, each to provide certain information or functionality to our customers. My responsibility for this rotation will be to design and implement a strategy regarding user preferences and administration that will stretch across all the different modules. Another major responsibility will be to manage the development of a native Blackberry application for myEngines. This will be a great opportunity for me to really own an important project for this high-visibility, cutting edge area of our business!

Web-apps to the rescue

At the end of my first week in the office, my Assignment Leader asked me to put together a pitch to present to his boss, just to make sure that she was up to speed with what I will and will not be doing during my first rotation. Seeing as how this rotation is all about process improvement, a flowchart was a must...but how was I going to draw this chart if I don’t have Visio?

This situation was the exact same one that many other IMLP’s at bootcamp found themselves in while working on the final case study. The solution? Well a web-based application of course! Andrew Starr (a first-rotation GE Corporate IMLP) suggested this web-app called Gliffy, which in essence is a slightly watered down version of Visio on a browser. Similar to other charting applications, it features a set of templates with pre-defined commonly used shapes. But Gliffy goes one step further and adds versioning to every file you save, making it really easy to revert to an older version of your diagrams if you ever need to.

Sadly enough Gliffy is only free for the first 30 days, then you have to pay to use this service. But during 30-day trial you have access to all of its features – so it’s perfect for when you’re in a diagramming pinch!

Here are a few other (free) web application that may come in handy:

• The Big Picture: simple yet beautiful task/project management application.
• Aviary: not a single app, but a suite of image editing software – basically Photoshop on the web
• Groove Shark: similar to Pandora, but you build your own play list in place of the application suggestions.