United Technologies – “Perhaps we should call ourselves disparate technologies”

Pros

I work for a division of Pratt & Whitney which is one of the major business units of UTC. We were purchased from the Boeing Company a little less than 3.5 years ago. Before that, we were owned by Rockwell International. I have worked for these three major multi-national corporations essentially without changing desks. Of the three, UTC is the second best. Regardless, I get to work on - among other things - rocket engines and I get to be part of hurling humans into space. What could be bad about that? UTC has, over all, really exciting products to be working on and I get to work on what I consider some of the most exciting. That's reason enough for me. Overall, as well, the pay and benefits aren't all that bad and the corporation tries to be responsible and respectful.

Cons

UTC is very hierarchical and backward-looking when it comes to its management style. The company is top-heavy with attorneys, overly protective of Intellectual Property, and verges on the paranoid with respect to intranet and Internet security. There is little trust displayed in how the corporation protects those interests it seems to divorce from the interests of its employees. They have also moved to outsource virtually all of their information technology assets. This appears to be unfortunate in light of the seismic changes occurring in web-based (Internet or intranet) services and the design principles behind them - sometimes referred to as Web 2.0. My experience is that very few people involved in IT (especially the "leadership") have little idea of what's going on in the outside world that is driving the development of web-based services.

So . . . when it comes to information technology as it is used in support of business processes and innovation, I would aver that United Technologies is well behind the curve and is digging itself a hole that may be hard to climb out of someday; maybe soon.

Advice to Senior Management

Lighten up. Learn to trust your employees a little more or, at the least, recognize that preventing what damage one or two people can do just might also be preventing a huge amount of progress and value-added innovation everyone else could have discovered or created if only you hadn't made it so clear you didn't trust them. Address this problem and maybe our technologies would REALLY be United.