End of Summer Fun

Recently GE Capital's Retail Finance business held "Celebrate You" week. It was a chance for our business to recognize the accomplishments that the employees have achieved. The business arranged a Senior Leader Networking Breakfast, Signature Scavenger Hunt, a barbeque, and a number of other activities. For IMLPs, it was also a great time to meet seniors leader and people on other teams. The barbeque was a fun way to unwind at the end of the day and we even got a chance to watch a Magic Comedy Show. Here is GE Capital IMLP, Amanda, participating in the show:

Innovation: Creating a New Pattern

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When faced with an opportunity, applying commonly used patterns often creates an effective solution. Sometimes inherent inefficiencies limit effective solutions from being optimal. Enter innovation. Innovation creates a new pattern and applies it to an opportunity. When the new pattern beats the old ones, embrace it. When it does not, discard it. Just don’t avoid it. Only with new, innovative ideas do technological revolutions occur.

We applied that philosophy to enabling mobile access to our systems. Three common patterns exist in the mobile app development world: ignore it, build everything from scratch, or use a code generator to assemble and generate it. Each of these contains flaws or inefficiencies. Ignoring the mobile app world creates a risk to the business as customers look to competitors who better meet their needs. Building everything from scratch requires an army of developers trained in the various mobile technologies. This duplicates the amount of effort needed. Consolidating the effort within a shared team alleviates some of the duplication. Doing so may also cause a slowed response as projects compete for resources. Finally, most code generators require the adoption of a full ecosystem and teams trained to use and support that ecosystem. While code generators reduce the effort to build apps, they fail to reduce the duplication of effort.

Instead, we approached the opportunity by looking for a way to isolate the system teams from having to learn much about the mobile environment. We set data and actions available to the data as the foundation. We are creating an app containing a mobile suite of components that adapt to data and actions associated with that data. So when the app receives the data, it routes the data to the appropriate type of presentation which adapts to the data along with the actions available. The system teams focus on the data that they want exposed and the actions available on that data instead of on the details of the mobile environment and its usage paradigm. Since the components adapt to data and actions on the data, additional functionality and systems may be exposed without duplicating the development effort on the mobile client.

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Bridgeport Rescue Mission Volunteer Day

On Wednesday, July 14, a group of Corporate IMLPs and interns volunteered on four-hour shifts at the Bridgeport Men’s Rescue Mission in Bridgeport, CT. The first shift began at 8am despite some heavy rain at the time! We met up with Marion Schrade, a manager at the Mission who introduced us to many of the Mission’s residents. She then took us on a tour of the facility, taking us through the kitchen that serves over 1,400 meals a day, the event room which serves as both a classroom and spiritual room, and the various housing sections of the facility which house both short term and longer term residents. It was very interesting to learn about this complex operation and the services that it provides.

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GE Can Start Your Career in the Fast Lane

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