Software Architect
IBM Software Business
Berkshire, UK

A Week in the Life of: Liz Ince, Software Architect for the IBM Software Business

Liz specialises in Retail Applications. She has a degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and is also a member of the IET (Institution of Engineers and Technologists). She has been with IBM for 23years. Liz lives with her partner Alasdair (a submarine cable consulting engineer) in Berkshire, UK. She has two teenage children.

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

Monday
This morning I am driving down the M3 for my regular monthly visit to a customer I have been working with for 4 years now. After working together on several very high profile and successful projects helping to implement new systems that directly support their stores and website, I know them very well.

When you have regular meetings and the customer knows and trusts you then you catch potential problems at a regular meeting or they will pick up the phone as soon as something goes wrong. We can then fix it with the minimum of fuss, and minimal impact to the business.

IBM encourages employees to work from home – so they provide computers, broadband lines and mobile phones for us. So after my meeting I head back home for a quick sandwich and then I log onto the system and write up minutes of the meeting. If there is something I need to do as a result of the meeting, I try to finish this before 6pm.

Tuesday
Today I am driving into my local IBM office at Bedfont Lakes near Heathrow. We have an internal education session on some new products within our Tivoli Systems Management product suite. Tivoli helps computer users automate their systems.

I meet up with many of my colleagues in the office as most of us in the architects’ team are all attending this education session.

After lunch in the staff restaurant I go and find a desk to work at for the afternoon. IBM has implemented a system called “Hot desking” because most of the time we are all out at a customers’ sites in meetings or working at home. Every office in the UK has hot desks – you find one that is free – plug in your laptop, log onto the phone and then you are all set.

This afternoon I have a conference call with my colleagues in IBM USA. We are implementing new systems and the team who write the software are giving us advice on how the software should be used.  Obviously we cannot keep flying across the Atlantic to have meetings so we have regular get together on the phone. Frequently 10 people meet together on the phone.

After our IBM only conference call we then have a second conference call this time with the customer who is implementing the software. I like to always chat to my colleagues first before involving the customer. That way we don’t waste time on background but can devote all our energy to discussing solutions.

Wednesday
A quiet morning at home catching up on administration and completing my ever-growing “to-do” list. At last it will turn into a done list!

At lunchtime I catch the train into London to visit another customer. They have been using a system – this one provides price information to their department stores – and its time to move to a later version of the software. I always try and get my customers to plan early for any software upgrades. Catching potential issues early means that we plan round them and the problem disappears. Many large important IT systems take over a year to plan and upgrade.

The ones I hate the most are the “sudden death” system upgrades. In a quiet time of year we take the system down totally (usually Saturday evening) and then bring the brand new replacement up on Sunday morning. It’s a nightmare if anything goes wrong so we always test this type of upgrade until we are sick of doing it – and we also have a well-tested fall-back plan – that’s so we know we can get out of a hole if the upgrade goes wrong!
 
Most of the large websites I work on are very large indeed and use literally hundreds of large powerful processors to run them – and many of them are so critical to business that they have an identical mirror image system just sitting there monitoring what the first one is doing so that if it falls over then it will pick up the workload without any customers even noticing that has happened. It’s the difference between 98% availability and 99.9% availability – and moving that last 1.9% can cost millions of pounds.

Thursday
This morning I am writing a presentation. Next week I am going to France for a technical conference and I am presenting a paper. I try and attend a conference once a year and if I am going I always try and deliver a paper.

This time I am talking about Retail 2010 – how retail trends are driving software systems.  I have to be able to discuss business with the customer and then map that to a computer system that will deliver a better service to the customer.

One such system my colleagues are working on is in the area of ladies shoes. A large department store we are working with will take literally millions of pounds in ladies shoe sales in a single store in a year. With that amount of sales revenue at stake it is certainly worth looking at the latest RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) to keep track of what shoes are in or out of stock).

Friday
I’m on a conference call with my team and manager at 8.30am. It’s a quick wrap-up to the week and an opportunity to discuss any tricky situations and ask for advice from my boss and my colleagues. My boss lives in Liverpool, I live in Berkshire and the rest of the team is spread all over the UK.

We are pretty much in charge of our own workload – we all have objectives, but my driving concern is to assist my customer in getting the IBM software they have bought used to help them make their business work better.

Later I head to IBM Hursley Park near Winchester – one of our big development labs. I have a customer meeting at Hursley all day. We are looking at future trends and directions in Java, and discussing how IBM’s new software products can help them.

We finish at 4.30pm today, which is great as I can head off up the M3 before the traffic gets too bad. I’m also back home by 5.45pm and go to my daughter’s school parents’ evening tonight. The only problem with this is that I will have to log back on again at 9pm tonight to deal with the last emails of the week before I finally pour a glass of wine and relax for the weekend.

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