The South Atlantic region, home to nearly two dozen of Computerworld’s 2007 Best Places to Work in IT, offers everything from the activity of cities like Washington, Atlanta and Miami to the tranquility of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountain ranges and hundreds of miles of beaches. There’s something for everyone here, and for IT professionals with the right skills, there are job opportunities, too. Here’s a look at three Best Places companies, their current IT projects and the skills they need.
Southern style: With a name like “Southern” and headquarters in Atlanta, one could imagine that this US$15 billion energy company might espouse some old-fashioned notions around things like honor, fairness and ethics.
Indeed, the company’s “Southern Style” principles include three values: unquestionable trust, superior performance and total commitment. “They are the basis for everything we do,” says Robert Morgan, a systems support Unix manager. “Ethics is stressed from the top down.”
Southern Co.
CIO: Rebecca Blalock
IT Head Count: More than 1,000
Current IT Projects: Massive integration and modernization of business systems; Windows Vista upgrade for desktops
Current IT Skills Sought: Windows, enterprise storage, C#, .Net, Java, GIS
Although most companies at least pay lip service to such principles, Southern has several programs and practices to make them real, Morgan says. For example, he cites a leadership development program in IT that was established by CIO Becky Blalock. “She set up a team of people that cross all the towers within IT. They do a two-year rotation, and the focus is on making IT a great place to work.”
Blalock’s “Voice of IT” team conducts focus groups with managers and rank-and-file employees and has come up with a number of initiatives, Morgan says.
The company’s values are traditional, but its technology is definitely 21st century. In a huge, companywide project, Southern is standardizing and overhauling old system silos so that it has just one system for each of the basic business processes, such as general ledger, accounts payable, supply chain and so on.
Much of that effort involves Oracle ERP and IBM Maximo application software and the Sun Solaris operating system. “This is one of the largest projects we have ever done in IT,” Morgan says.
He adds that Southern is looking for IT skills of all types. In particular, he says, “enterprise storage is a critical area, and it’s very difficult to bring in someone without experience because of the risk.”
Julie Weeks, a human resources business consultant at Southern, says the company is also looking for people with C#, .Net, Java and GIS skills. “We’ve been seeing an increase in our hiring the last few years,” according to Weeks. “We are an aging workforce, so we’ve had a lot of opportunity.”
As a senior client services analyst at Southern, Marshalla Cofer’s job is to act as a liaison between IT and the end users in the company’s operating units, such as Georgia Power Co. “My job is to make sure they can do their jobs smoothly and efficiently,” she says.
Cofer adds that the company encourages employees to periodically take stock of their positions, to think about what they want to do next and then to “take ownership of that, to pick the path where you want to go.” She says she’s currently thinking about moving into corporate communications.
In the meantime, Cofer is gearing up for her next big IT project — upgrading 28,000 PCs to Windows Vista.
Multitrack exposure: In 2005, Raymond James Financial overhauled its IT organization and in so doing greatly expanded its project management office. The company also revamped its development methodologies and tools, presenting a great opportunity for Kelly Berenbaum and 14 other project managers in the new office.
Now Berenbaum, who had previously managed a team of imaging application developers, sits at the intersection of the company’s technology and financial services activities. “We as project managers put heavy focus on scope management, budget management, risk management and trying to get control of our projects,” she says.
Berenbaum specializes in marketing projects, and her current big one is to help stitch together the systems and databases for the company’s different financial services so that financial advisers and managers will have a holistic view of clients. “We want to recognize client relationships rather than individual accounts,” she says.
Raymond James Financial
CIO: Tim Eitel
IT Head Count: 910
Current IT Projects: Client relationship management rollup; new corporate actions system
Current IT Skills Sought: Web services, C#, database and systems administration, Windows development, networks and security
For example, Berenbaum says account managers would make better decisions about how to tailor services and fees in one area for a client if they knew what else Raymond James was doing for that client.
That will require building new SQL Server databases and Web applications using C# and presentation layer development tools from Infragistics Inc., she says.
Asked what she likes about her job, Berenbaum says, “We are not pigeonholed. We get a lot of technology exposure and a lot of business exposure working in the front lines with people developing strategies for Raymond James. Management really expects us to keep our skills current. That promotes loyalty when they care that you are competitive.”
Care, indeed. CIO Tim Eitel says he feels strongly that his employees should be given the opportunity to try lots of different things, even knowing they won’t always work out. “Someone may say, ‘I want to go into management,’ but then, after a time, they don’t like it, and they can certainly go back into the technical side with no penalty,” he explains. Many technical people make more money than the managers they report to, he adds.
Asked to name his current No. 1 project, Eitel says, “I have 35 No. 1 projects going.”
One of them, he says, involves working with Indian conglomerate Tata Group to develop a new system to handle the thousands of “corporate actions” — such as dividends or stock splits — that Raymond James must process each day. It will be a custom system built around Oracle, Unix and C#, and it will be owned jointly by Tata and Raymond James.
Eitel needs people with IT skills “across the board — database administrators, system administrators, Windows developers, network engineers and security engineers,” he says.
Hiring people with financial experience is not important, Eitel adds. “We train them. We want them to have great ambition and great energy.”
Marriott International
CIO: Carl Wilson
IT Head Count: 1,613
Current IT Projects: Automatic language translation for Marriott.com; enhanced support for BlackBerry users; enhanced automation for Marriott Rewards program
Current IT Skills Sought: Java, J2EE, WebSphere Portal and Administration, capacity planning
A cooperative environment: It has been a profound transformation for the lodging giant. Not that long ago, a guest at a Marriott International hotel got his first impression of the place when he walked into the lobby. Lobbies still matter, of course, but now that first impression is much more likely to come from Marriott’s Web site, says Sean McDermott, an information resources manager who heads up testing and quality assurance for Marriott.com.
McDermott takes a lot of pride in the Web site, through which $5 billion in bookings flow each year. “You can do a 360-degree look in a room, and photos are available of the pool and exercise room, the grounds, attractions in the local area and so on,” he says.
A current project for McDermott is to greatly expand Marriott’s global presence on the Web by automating the translation of English content for foreign-language Web sites. English to German has been completed, and the company is now working on Chinese and Spanish, he says.
In another Web-related project, Marriott is working to make it easier for guests to use points they have earned in the Marriott Rewards program. The idea is to automatically apply reward certificates to new reservations so that customers don’t have to call up certificates from their accounts and apply them manually.
Asked what’s special about Marriott, McDermott cites the loyalty employees have for the company. In fact, he says, the company recently established a program to recognize people with 50 or more years of service.
Sean Candy has progressed through several jobs at Marriott in 10 years: help desk technician, Windows systems administrator and project manager, Unix systems administrator and now product manager. One of the products he manages is the BlackBerry, which Marriott employees use in the field.
A current project seeks to enhance the uptime of BlackBerries and make problem resolution faster and easier. Marriott is looking for tools that can push monitoring down to the level of individual users.
“We are looking for first-contact problem resolution so it doesn’t have to be escalated up to another help desk,” Candy says. He notes that various vendors claim to have such tools, but it remains to be seen if they will do what Marriott wants.
Candy says he likes the “open and friendly” atmosphere at Marriott, where both peers’ and managers’ contributions are recognized. In IT, the environment is “more cooperative than competitive,” compared with other places he has worked, he says.
“You get the opportunity to work in a lot of different areas,” he adds. “They support your moves between groups, even if you don’t have all the skills yet.”
