Life on the inside at Philips IT Applications

Hilina Mulatu, Senior IT Specialist at Philips IT Applications in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) specializes in SharePoint applications, which means that intranet portals, extranets, document management systems, collaboration spaces, social networking tools and business intelligence systems are all part of the diverse challenges she faces in her job. Fortunately, she has the right tools to do it. Philips’ commitment to the personal and professional development of its staff means that she’s fully up to speed with the latest technologies in web-based communications and cloud computing.

Currently, she is leading and coaching a team of twelve IT professionals in Eindhoven (The Netherlands),  Bangalore (India) and Shanghai (China), in a one-year project with half a million Euros at its disposal to converge all the selected business applications onto a common SharePoint platform.

“In the past, different parts of Philips have developed their own solutions, but once you show them the power of platforms such as SharePoint they are really keen to migrate,” says Hilina.

By using latest technologies like video-conferencing, messaging and group workspaces (SharePoint) she keeps in constant touch with her globally distributed virtual team.

Real responsibility

“I’m only two years into the job and I’m already being given responsibility for major projects,” says Hilina. “But it’s not just the large projects that give me satisfaction. During my time working at Philips, I’ve felt just as rewarded by sitting down with a manager in one of Philips’ legal departments and generating a SharePoint application for her right there on the spot.”

What that highlights about Hilina is her customer focus.

“We may be working for other parts of Philips, but to us they are all customers,” she says, “and understanding what our customers want, what makes their businesses tick, and then translating that into effective IT solutions is what the job is really all about.”

Greater opportunity

Interestingly, when she left university after studying computer science at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, the challenge and diversity that Hilina enjoys in her job at Philips is something she thought she could get by another route. Like many smart computer science graduates, she worked for a short time with a company to gain experience and then went freelance. In fact, that’s the basis on which she first encountered Philips.

“For me, freelancing wasn’t so much about being self-employed. It was about the variety of projects and business environments I would be able to experience if I took a succession of 6-month contracts,” she says.

However, according to Hilina, there’s a catch in that argument.

“When a company gets in a freelancer to do a project, the project has already been defined and the rules have been set,” she says. “I quickly realized that if I joined Philips it would be me who was making those decisions and taking responsibility for a project’s success, not someone else.”

In practice, rather than limiting her opportunities, joining Philips has massively increased them.

“Philips is such a large organization, with so many different businesses and such a wide range of different application areas, that it offers me all the challenges and diversity I could wish for,” she says. “And because Philips actively monitors the growth of all its employees, I have a line manager who really takes an interest in where I want to work, what I want to do, and the sort of challenges I am looking for. Then he makes sure I get them.”