Transforming a Paper World into a Digital Galaxy at GE Aviation

GE Aviation’s partnership with Cicada helps to further digitize the current technology ecosystem.

Chris Carissimi/GE Aviation, VP Software Engineering, GE Digital and GE Aviation

Our overall IT organization has now moved underneath our digital organization, so we’ve taken traditional legacy IT and moved that underneath our digital function to further enable the digital products as well as imbed additional products into the business units. One of the things that my team does is work on not only optimizing and automating those business processes, but embedding those products as we do it. I have been here 13 years, and have been in the IT field for roughly 17 years. I worked for a small division of NASA called the National Technology Transfer Center.

LEAD Magazine: Give me a brief description of what you do.

Chris Carissimi: I run aviation digital technologies internal software engineering organization for GE. I do all of the traditional productivity apps for all of our internal function – engineering, services, sales, etc. – heavily focused on contemporary technologies and internal software development.

LEAD Magazine: What are some of the technological victories you have experienced?

Chris Carissimi: The most recent one is a product called Paasport, recently renamed Cicada, where we looked at automating as much of the governance and infrastructure and platform activities as humanly possible. And subsequently we were able to produce a product that I sponsor internally that actually enables a developer to go to a web front end and request a new application and spin up all of their environments – dev, QA and prod as well as all of their CIC...pipeline in a governed, consistent fashion immense (this sentence doesn’t make sense to me). We then took that product to other business units and just recently it has been selected as the product to be used across all of GE development. Chuck Culture as well as Eric Davidson actually came up with the idea and they were able to build it in six months.

CICADA: Continuous Integration, Continuous Application, Deployment, a. Nobody knows what the last A stands for :)

LEAD Magazine: Just like the bug?

Chris Carissimi: Yes. Gross name, great product.

I absolutely love my job. This is my favorite role at GE. I am so passionate about it. The direction where we are headed makes it easy to do that. I am very committed to software development and to intellectual properties that pertain to General Electric and what we are trying to do with this organization.

LEAD Magazine: What are some of the challenges?

Chris Carissimi: The biggest challenge day to day is the constantly changing ecosystem that we are operating in and trying to keep pace with that. It’s par for the course. We have been running like this for over 18 months now. We thought a valley would follow that peak but it hasn’t. This is the new normal, the constantly changing environment we are seeing as we continue to reinvent ourselves as a digital industrial company.

It has modified how we operate as leaders. It requires us to trust and empower people a lot more. Our job is not delegation and it is not statusing and it’s what we used to call guidance management teams. How do we keep our teams moving forward? How do we continue delivering the right outcomes for the business? And that is really what we focus on. Our team is flexible and we face whatever the day brings.

It is fun to see the new age thinking but it is equally as fun to see some of the veterans embrace the new way of working, as well. The blend of the two cultures is far more beneficial than the two collisions that could happen.

We started the Agile journey 15-18 months ago. Early on we were very small. We were about 20 people then. I was personally involved in a lot of the early Agile teams and by that, I was an innocent bystander and I never spoke up because back then you got yelled at by the teams, which was the right thing to do. It was fun to learn and it was fun to watch the teams learn and then we took what we learned in those small teams and then we grew it into the space we have now, which is really quite impressive if you look at how quickly we were able to do that. We work very hard at different things these days. All of it has been a collective effort with heavy amount of support from senior level leadership. It has been a very fun journey for me.

We have an intrepreneur mindset not an entrepreneur mindset. If this was your business, would you wait for that answer? Would you knock through that barrier? That is the approach we have been taking as an organization. I believe it helps us succeed at more speed than we have historically seen in an enterprise environment. Jude has been a huge proponent. I challenge my staff and my entire organization to be advocates for the transformation and help lead people on the journey.

LEAD Magazine: Tell me about your vision for technology in this region.

Chris Carissimi: You are going to continue to see people move up the stack; we are full stack developers, and that is intentional. Gone are the days of really being an infrastructure as a service or even being a platform as a service shop. The value is how can you help grow the business at a process digitization perspective. If you look at our whole digital industrial premise it is based on that concept. How do we help blue chip enterprise industrial companies take a different look at their processes and the opportunities therein and digitizing them to get more economy to scale, whether it’s in forms of cash, productivity, you name it. And that is really where I see a majority of my peers across other businesses moving. There is always going to be the vendors at the lower levels struggling because of the infrastructure and the platform tiers and I think you are going to continue to see that. I think you are going to see some big vendors take large stakes in those and as long as there is healthy competition there it will be okay. I don’t think you are going to see enterprises continue in that game. At the end of the day we don’t get paid to run servers. My CEO doesn’t care if I patched a server last year. They care about what am I doing for cash, what am I doing for inventory and for engineering productivity, etc. The list goes on and on. Things that are business metric decisions - I think you are going to see us continue to have those conversations.

We have to do things to keep ourselves secure in-house.

Security is so pertinent to how we operate. We have security developers within our pods – secure full stack developers.

Pods need to have guardrails and have a solid understanding of what a pod means.

Four developers, a scrum leader and a technical architect.

Standard pod is five to eight people, including junior and senior developers, front end, back end.

We are very organic about how we move around processes. Right now our big debate is over scrum master and pod leader.

We want to be the best damn software engineers. Trust first, then the best, then bring everyone with us on our journey and agile execution.