GE Aviation Edison Works, Director, Technical Products: Our Focus is on Reducing Technical Debt

Jill Campbell, Director, Technical Products, GE Aviation Edison Works speaks with Catherine Bushong, Director, Strategic Accounts & Partnership Engagement, Vernovis about her role and how the organization is overcoming tech challenges.

Campbell is part of Edison Works, the IT infrastructure and application support. Her team is part of a three-tiered group that supports air gap networks for the DOD, all of the DOD branches, and certain contracts for the aviation space.

GE Edison Works plays the R&D role for different aviation initiatives for the military. It is also currently  looking at secure manufacturing.

“Once these brilliant minds create these wonderful, potentially huge country-and-military-changing initiatives in this space, we then have to deliver them. We're working on allowing those minds to create these things and, using the technology and the support that we give — put in an ERP system and a supply chain to be able to produce and deliver tangible items,” Campbell says.

That approach to implementing tech is often taken for granted in a normal open side space.

“Since I have a large number of air gap networks, and I do not have access to the internet, the time it takes to actually burn it to a CD, get it approved, do it in a safe way, scan it, and all the steps that we have to take, take a large period of time. We have to then bring it in, apply it, and then we have to go to the next room, into the next network. So, we're looking at how we protect the data, protect the environment, but also streamline and automate. Our focus really is on operational stability and reducing technical debt,” Campbell says.

She mentions that the key challenge is to automate and simplify things and put in standard practices. The initiatives are aimed at doing things securely and helping engineers and the business work more efficiently with the customers.

“So, we're offering some very safe collaborative tools that are accepted, and we implement those to help that. We are also looking at some of the DOD initiatives and partnering with them to solve the same problems and still maintain the level of security,” Campbell adds.

She explains that it's not just the timeline of solving problems but also being able to sell solutions to the customer.

“We want to deliver, but we also have to take pause and look at how those things get implemented or how they're going to get used, and make sure that we're doing it in the most closed area way,” she concludes.