Information Systems Mentor: Mike Bitsch, Senior Design Engineer at Veris
Educational Background: Electrical Engineering Degree from BYU-Idaho
Professional Experience: Worked at Intel, Stexar, and now works for Veris, a company that develops electricity-metering systems for monitoring purposes. Since being with Veris, Mike has helped to develop five patents.
I chose to Interview Mike because he’s a great contact for a very successful company and he's worked for Micron, Intel, and some other computer/engineering related companies. He gave me an interesting insight into how he sees business. I wanted to know how informational technologies played into what he did.
Summary of what was discussed and learned:
Current role and responsibilities: Mike is responsible for firmware development of high-density power meters that Veris produces. Veris designs commercial and industrial power meters for businesses so they can monitor what’s going on in their business. Some products monitor every circuit breaker in a panel. Mike is in charge of coming up with design requirements, feature sets, figuring out what their target market are looking for and then he figures out what his company can actually deliver. Mike works closely with the hardware engineer and Mike does the firmware (firmware is software, it’s an operating system and application all rolled into one).
Basically his job is to take an analog signal (real world) and make it digital. He’s more mid-tech, not high-tech. In fact, only one of his co-workers has a Master’s degree. He spent a long time explaining to me about sine waves, how it shows you an electric current, a bunch of fancy equipment, all basically saying that you can’t control what you can’t monitor.
After Mike gets done designing, his work should go to a validation engineer, but Mike is the developer and also the engineer, so he compares what marketing research has said, tests the said functions, etc. For example, ether net is a feature they’re working on plugging into their meter. Marketing has told him that is what customers want, now it’s up to him to make it happen. Veris is built on the business that customers want to understand the energy they use.
The career path taken to get to their current position:
Electrical engineering major. Intel was his first job out of college and he said they stunk. Then he went to Stexar as a firmware engineer. Intel he worked on a baseboard manager controller-A system that talks to a server or a network that can pull software. IT department uses it, no one else really.
What is the importance of graduate school in the industry?
It depends on what you want to do. For what Mike is doing, graduate school isn’t really important. If Mike went to grad school, it would have been a higher starting salary, but where he is right now, it wouldn’t affect his job. He would like the information, but he’s in a good spot.
Most of the guys in marketing or management team have MBAs, either when they started or since they’ve been there. So the business side of things, experience and grad school are both a must.
Suggested resources to find more information on your industry?
LEED Certification journals (look to see what company’s are looking for to get their LEED points out of it). EE Times (electronics industry). There’s probably dozens, and he doesn’t keep track of any of them.
Advice or suggestions for being successful in your industry?
Don’t pin yourself in to a particular field. Where Mike ended up isn’t where he thought he’d be. Pick something that you love. Mike does this because he loves it. He’d rather spend his time at home, but he does love his job. Mike said to beg your way into an internship. There are still a lot of jobs in engineering. You can find work if you’re willing to look for it, but if you’re a new college grad, there’s enough people looking for jobs without some kind of relevant experience.
Mike gave advice to talk to someone in your field, and find out what’s important in your field.
Broad business world advice:
Learn to work with other groups within the company: be able to actually talk to other people. The big thing is knowing how to work with people and handle expectations. Sometimes he has to tell marketing “no,” in a diplomatic way.
How does marketing tie into what you do?
Marketing should know the product, what it does and how it operates. Their expectation is for Mike to help them learn. Marketing needs to be reasonably competent. Marketing is to give feedback to make a better product (e.g. here’s the features the customers like, want, or need improvement). Marketing is not 100% of their customer interface. Mike will go out himself to get feedback and find out first hand.
Mike also deals a lot with production (calibration, etc). Everyone in the company needs to understand the product to some degree. Marketing needs to know a lot more about what the product does. Next to tech support, Marketing needs the know how the product works. Some marketers have EE degrees, some just learn it on the job. Some terminology is able to pass on from field to field, which is helpful if you hop from job to job during your first few years.
What were the some important things that I learned?
1) If you want to make it big in business, it’s important to have an MBA. Just as important as education, though, is networking. Mike said to do everything you can, beg if you have to, to get an internship at a good company you’d like to work for. An internship, many times, acts as the training grounds for your stay within the company.
2) Figure out how to make money doing what you want to do. Mike said that even if he didn’t work where he does, he would still do what he does at work at his home. He even uses his experience to develop and build things for his house.
Professional Experience: Worked at Intel, Stexar, and now works for Veris, a company that develops electricity-metering systems for monitoring purposes. Since being with Veris, Mike has helped to develop five patents.
I chose to Interview Mike because he’s a great contact for a very successful company and he's worked for Micron, Intel, and some other computer/engineering related companies. He gave me an interesting insight into how he sees business. I wanted to know how informational technologies played into what he did.
Summary of what was discussed and learned:
Current role and responsibilities: Mike is responsible for firmware development of high-density power meters that Veris produces. Veris designs commercial and industrial power meters for businesses so they can monitor what’s going on in their business. Some products monitor every circuit breaker in a panel. Mike is in charge of coming up with design requirements, feature sets, figuring out what their target market are looking for and then he figures out what his company can actually deliver. Mike works closely with the hardware engineer and Mike does the firmware (firmware is software, it’s an operating system and application all rolled into one).
Basically his job is to take an analog signal (real world) and make it digital. He’s more mid-tech, not high-tech. In fact, only one of his co-workers has a Master’s degree. He spent a long time explaining to me about sine waves, how it shows you an electric current, a bunch of fancy equipment, all basically saying that you can’t control what you can’t monitor.
After Mike gets done designing, his work should go to a validation engineer, but Mike is the developer and also the engineer, so he compares what marketing research has said, tests the said functions, etc. For example, ether net is a feature they’re working on plugging into their meter. Marketing has told him that is what customers want, now it’s up to him to make it happen. Veris is built on the business that customers want to understand the energy they use.
The career path taken to get to their current position:
Electrical engineering major. Intel was his first job out of college and he said they stunk. Then he went to Stexar as a firmware engineer. Intel he worked on a baseboard manager controller-A system that talks to a server or a network that can pull software. IT department uses it, no one else really.
What is the importance of graduate school in the industry?
It depends on what you want to do. For what Mike is doing, graduate school isn’t really important. If Mike went to grad school, it would have been a higher starting salary, but where he is right now, it wouldn’t affect his job. He would like the information, but he’s in a good spot.
Most of the guys in marketing or management team have MBAs, either when they started or since they’ve been there. So the business side of things, experience and grad school are both a must.
Suggested resources to find more information on your industry?
LEED Certification journals (look to see what company’s are looking for to get their LEED points out of it). EE Times (electronics industry). There’s probably dozens, and he doesn’t keep track of any of them.
Advice or suggestions for being successful in your industry?
Don’t pin yourself in to a particular field. Where Mike ended up isn’t where he thought he’d be. Pick something that you love. Mike does this because he loves it. He’d rather spend his time at home, but he does love his job. Mike said to beg your way into an internship. There are still a lot of jobs in engineering. You can find work if you’re willing to look for it, but if you’re a new college grad, there’s enough people looking for jobs without some kind of relevant experience.
Mike gave advice to talk to someone in your field, and find out what’s important in your field.
Broad business world advice:
Learn to work with other groups within the company: be able to actually talk to other people. The big thing is knowing how to work with people and handle expectations. Sometimes he has to tell marketing “no,” in a diplomatic way.
How does marketing tie into what you do?
Marketing should know the product, what it does and how it operates. Their expectation is for Mike to help them learn. Marketing needs to be reasonably competent. Marketing is to give feedback to make a better product (e.g. here’s the features the customers like, want, or need improvement). Marketing is not 100% of their customer interface. Mike will go out himself to get feedback and find out first hand.
Mike also deals a lot with production (calibration, etc). Everyone in the company needs to understand the product to some degree. Marketing needs to know a lot more about what the product does. Next to tech support, Marketing needs the know how the product works. Some marketers have EE degrees, some just learn it on the job. Some terminology is able to pass on from field to field, which is helpful if you hop from job to job during your first few years.
What were the some important things that I learned?
1) If you want to make it big in business, it’s important to have an MBA. Just as important as education, though, is networking. Mike said to do everything you can, beg if you have to, to get an internship at a good company you’d like to work for. An internship, many times, acts as the training grounds for your stay within the company.
2) Figure out how to make money doing what you want to do. Mike said that even if he didn’t work where he does, he would still do what he does at work at his home. He even uses his experience to develop and build things for his house.
Information Systems Today
What is the role of information systems in a typical business?
It's the cogs and bolts of technology that keep the business running and make it efficient. A business can keep a good customer base by making transactions easier, by having a user friendly website with working links, and solving a customers problems in their products they deliver. A business can attract and keep good employees through their computer networks and technology. Technology can also make an employee more productive. Everywhere you go these days, you're going to be working on a computer and if the company is over just a few employees, then most likely on a network.
Information Systems Careers
Programmer
Consultant
Teacher-Trainer
Technical Support
End-User Support Analyst
Systems Analyst
Network Analyst
IT Specialist
Database Specialist
Application Developer
Information Security Manager
Web/E-commerce System Developer
Key Information Systems Terms
Network: is a collection of computers and other hardware components interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information
Server: a physical computer (a hardware system) dedicated to running one or more services, as a host, to serve the needs of the users of other computers on the network.
Database: Organized collection of data.
Internet: a global system of interconnected computer network. This was purportedly invented by Al Gore.
Firewall: a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts
Enterprise Resource Planning:
systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization including finance, manufacturing, sales, customer relationship, etc.
Customer Relationship Management: A widely implemented model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support.
Bandwidth: a rate of data transfer, bit rate or throughput, measured in bits per second (bps)
WiFi: a popular technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data wirelessly (using radio waves) over a computer network.
Moore's Law: observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on circuit boards doubles approximately every two years.
References
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-bus/dsci/miscareers.cfm and, my favorite, www.wikipedia.org
It's the cogs and bolts of technology that keep the business running and make it efficient. A business can keep a good customer base by making transactions easier, by having a user friendly website with working links, and solving a customers problems in their products they deliver. A business can attract and keep good employees through their computer networks and technology. Technology can also make an employee more productive. Everywhere you go these days, you're going to be working on a computer and if the company is over just a few employees, then most likely on a network.
Information Systems Careers
Programmer
Consultant
Teacher-Trainer
Technical Support
End-User Support Analyst
Systems Analyst
Network Analyst
IT Specialist
Database Specialist
Application Developer
Information Security Manager
Web/E-commerce System Developer
Key Information Systems Terms
Network: is a collection of computers and other hardware components interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information
Server: a physical computer (a hardware system) dedicated to running one or more services, as a host, to serve the needs of the users of other computers on the network.
Database: Organized collection of data.
Internet: a global system of interconnected computer network. This was purportedly invented by Al Gore.
Firewall: a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts
Enterprise Resource Planning:
systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization including finance, manufacturing, sales, customer relationship, etc.
Customer Relationship Management: A widely implemented model for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support.
Bandwidth: a rate of data transfer, bit rate or throughput, measured in bits per second (bps)
WiFi: a popular technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data wirelessly (using radio waves) over a computer network.
Moore's Law: observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on circuit boards doubles approximately every two years.
References
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-bus/dsci/miscareers.cfm and, my favorite, www.wikipedia.org