Altec visited the MIS program for our last AIMS meeting of the semester. Based in Birmingham, Altecoffers products and services to customers in many fields: electric utility, telecommunications, tree care, lights and signs, and construction. Their industry-leading performance in safety and features has stemmed from their company-wide integral values as well as the UA-MIS program, with several of their IT employees graduating from the program. Some of these graduates, representing their roles in Altec’s IT department, described their work to us, showing us examples of their tools and projects.
First, Mason Spivey, a developer and MIS alumnus, described his developer role at Altec. Utilizing one of the world’s largest Oracle installations, he works to analyze processes, build applications, and support these applications as well as the organization as a whole. His projects include the Altec Sales Cloud, which helps account managers utilize customer relationship management remotely on the web.
The next representative was Jill Moller, the business intelligence manager at Altec. Business intelligence at Altec, according to Ms. Moller, encompasses the support of decision making by enabling data-driven decisions. Using a next-generation tool called Qlik, Altec’s business intelligence delivers operational performance metrics, projected plant capacity, operational visibility, and systems monitoring.
Andy Burns, an architect in Altec’s data center and network operations, highlighted the importance of Altec’s work to keep networks working at all times. This specifically encompasses the redesign of Altec’sdata center network, robust disaster recovery, and enterprise security enhancements, which is crucial to their customers in the electric and telecommunications fields. Additionally, Altec’s other projects include mobile device integration high-definition videoconferencing for Altec employees.
Altec’s information system security role was represented by Jordan Willingham, who described the relevance of cybercrime prevention to Altec. Mr. Willingham’s role on the IS security team aims to identify and mitigate risks for the organization — and encompasses a responsibility for the firm’s entire digital global footprint. Typical IS security projects include configuring and deploying IS security servers, auditing software systems and current infrastructure, educating end users, and responding to emergency incident situations.
During this meeting, Altec proved the relevance and diversity of projects for which their information technology employees work daily, much like UA-MIS students.
UA Management Information Systems 