In the dynamic world of IT and business intelligence, Annie found her way into her field by allowing her interests to shape her career. From her unplanned start to her current role at Mazzella Companies, Annie’s journey sheds light on the ever-evolving nature of IT and the importance of adaptability and curiosity in this field.
What led you to a career in IT?
Annie shared that her path towards IT was not planned and that she fell into it because of her interests. “I was a marketing major in college and gravitated toward market research and data. My first job out of school was as a sales analyst position, which evolved into learning how to automate and scale reporting and eventually landed me on IT teams at previous companies. IT made sense since reporting touches all different faces of the business.”
What led you to Mazzella Companies?
Although she started a year and a half ago, her relationship with the company began at home, with her father working for the company as she grew up. “I always heard about what a great culture it was and their reputation in the industry. As a kid, having a parent who enjoyed going to work every day and was proud of what they did had a positive impact on me. I was very excited to see a job posting that fit my skill set.”
Now at Mazzella Companies and impacting others’ day-to-day work, Annie is part of a new business intelligence team. “We’re trying to automate some of the manual reports floating around right now. We work with leadership to understand what they’re doing manually and what they don’t currently have access to but wish they could.”
What is the biggest challenge facing the IT team today?
One of the biggest challenges Annie feels her team is facing today relates to acquisitions. Right now, a lot of data is in a lot of different legacy systems, and there’s a substantial amount of manual effort in reporting. “One of the projects our team is tasked with is consolidating information from these legacy systems into one central database so we can have data in one spot and take the manual effort out of reporting. We want a system that’s easy for the leadership to get information from quickly and tells the full story without having to access multiple databases.”
Related: What Makes Someone a Good Fit for Mazzella Companies?
How do you collaborate with other departments?
Annie says a lot of the collaboration she participates in is between Executive Leadership, Accounting, and Lifelong Learning. “We always want to ensure we publish trustworthy information to the end users. So, my role is collaborating with leadership on getting report requirements and then working with accounting to validate that information is accurate. And then we do partner with Lifelong Learning. They’re the experts to teach people how to consume what we’re publishing.”
Beyond Leadership, Accounting, and Lifelong Learning, Annie is always ready to help out other teams that make up Mazzella Companies. Annie recalled a project she worked on with the team at Sheffield Metals International in the Summer of 2022. “We were tasked to recover warranty information from an old database that hadn’t been used in years and that no one our team had worked in. We all worked together, and everybody was a hero at different points in the process. We were able to recover specific data points that were needed to defend a warranty claim. It was a big victory for us.”
What kind of professional development have you gotten at Mazzella Companies?
After working here for six months, Annie was invited to participate in SuiteWorld, Oracle NetSuite’s largest annual gathering of the NetSuite community. “I didn’t know much about NetSuite at that point, and so it was a great opportunity to attend different sessions where I learned about NetSuite’s many reporting features and was able to incorporate many of those features into my current role.”
Related: Join the Mazzella Companies Team!
What is your best approach to problem-solving?
Annie shared that while her first step is typically Google, she relies heavily on the subject matter experts within the company. “I feel like I always have somebody to go to if I have a question, and people are always willing to share their knowledge, what they know. If I run into an issue where we can’t solve it internally, my leadership has made a lot of great investments in external resources. I always have a consultant that I can go out to or a third-party vendor who can walk me through some of the more complex problems outside of our wheelhouse.”
What advice would you give someone interested in joining the IT team?
Annie said curiosity and continuous learning are the two best skills to hone in an IT career. “Some of the things that I was working on and learning ten years ago may be obsolete now, and there are new things I’m doing today that didn’t exist ten years ago. If you want to get into this line of work, continue to learn, stay curious, and challenge yourself.”
A Field of Endless Discovery
Annie’s path from a marketing major to a pivotal role in IT at Mazzella Companies exemplifies the versatility and potential for growth within the IT sector. Her story reminds us that in IT, the unexpected can lead to extraordinary opportunities, making it a field of boundless potential and endless discovery.
