What's my work ?? Read on !!

Many people have asked as to what my work “actually” involves. So for the benefit for all those eager souls and also for the people who want to work in the IT industry or those who don’t want to work here but want to know more, read on.

Usually, if someone is working in an IT company, they would be working in one of the following fields.

1. Mainframes
2. Open Systems
3. Enterprise Applications <-- I am here

Mainframes: AFAIK, Mainframes are huge machines which can store and process large amounts of data very safely and quickly. These are machines built mainly by IBM and are a bit “antiquated” if I can call it so. But many institutions like banks use mainframes to get their daily jobs done. Once a person learns how to work with the machine (in other words, coding) this job becomes a dull routine. Training for this course costs a lot if one wants to learn outside and therefore people who have the requisite knowledge are paid decently.

Open Systems: Heard of Java, C++, .NET?? Well, all these things come under this category. These are highly specialized languages as in these things require a fair amount of logical thinking and practice to get the optimum level of comfort in work. Most companies in India which come for Campus Interviews, recruit students and train them in one of these technologies. The work here is more interesting and people have decent opportunity to go abroad after gaining some experience.

Enterprise Applications(EA): Home territory, baby :-) The main purpose why companies use EA in their factories and offices is that because EA actually increases the efficiency and the quality of decision making in their organization. EA integrates the functioning of all the departments/shopfloors of a company and the CEO, with a click a button in his office can get all and any data in any format about any previous or prospective future company sales/purchase orders and take decisions with real time data. Hope u understand that ;-) There are three major Enterprise application in market today. They are:

1. SAP
2. PeopleSoft / JDE <-- I am here
3. Oracle

All the three above are three different companies producing softwares with the same names.

SAP is the big brother among the three. I work in the PeopleSoft EA.

When companies decide that they require EA to be installed in their organizations, they contact the consulting companies like mine. Then the guys in my company who have the required experience and knowledge go to the client office and finds out how exactly EA will help them and what are the modules they require to use. (EA softwares are very very big and companies use only a few relevant modules).

Once that is done, he gives instructions to the guys offshore (people like me:-) ). This instructions will include the technical specifications of the work to be done. In simpler words, what we actually do is to customize the existing software (JDE in my case) to suit our client needs.

People like me(who do the actual work) are called “Technical Consultants”. And the people who have the industry/domain expertise to advice the clients on their requirements(These are usually MBAs or technical guys with 4-5 years experience) are called “Functional Consultants”

Again, training in EA is very costly and very few people can learn it outside. Only few lucky ones out of all the people recruited by the companies through the campus recruitment get allotted to this field. These people are the lucky ones ;-) Why? Because they are the best paid in the industry. That’s not all. Working in EA gives person great insights about actual workings of big companies and that experience is very unique and useful for the future.

Chalo, that’s all for now. Hopefully I have shed some cobwebs after not posting for a month. If this post was in any helpful to you or you have anything to correct or add to my post do drop in a comment.I wud appreciate that very much :-)