My IT business experience.
January 25, 2020
I’ve come to learn that IT is one of the most important departments in the company. IT employees are essentially on the front lines of the field interacting with employees to keep all the vital online programs functioning.
Like I mentioned in class, my experience with IT has been as a user. I use the programs to do my job. These programs are essential for the company to stay profitable and competitive. Without the help of our IT department employees, things would go from bad to worse in a very short amount of time.
One example of this was from when I worked in the LA area, for a large industrial gasses company. Our local plant had just lost intranet communications with our remote operating center in New Jersey and I was the first to respond. When I arrived on scene, I took manual control of the plant, which wasn’t my normal responsibility nor had I any training to do. Since I was the only one there, I then found myself on the phone with two different people. The remote operator in New Jersey was telling me what to do as I fed him information from my control screen, and the IT engineer was helping me troubleshoot the network communications issue. The IT engineer and I soon discovered that the plant router had been unplugged probably by the janitor who had just been in the control room area cleaning. I simply plugged the router back in and within a few minutes, had restored communications with the remote operator. I could then finally relax and take a break. If it hadn’t been for the quick troubleshooting instinct of the IT engineer, we would have likely had to shut down the plant and would lose several hundred thousand dollars in production.
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