Thomas Schmidt

In this position at T-Systems I am responsible for a team of highly qualified IT professionals. Our main purpose is the development of our portfolio element DSC "Dynamic Services for Collaboration". DSC is a Microsoft based backoffice product suitable for companies from 5000 until 250k staff. Having said that we not only develop the product but also provide consulting services for our (potential) customers and sales team and last but not least we tailor the product to our customers needs.

After a few month @ T-Systems I was given the opportunity to get a new role in the newly created Expert Services department. In Expert Services we focussed on providing IT consultancy services to our internal and external customers. But to do that we needed to hire quite a few experienced IT architects and consulants and that was my main role in the first year: Get the best people on borad and train existing staff to the very same level. Everything else is history...

Starting a job at the largest IT service provider in Germany certainly has it's challenges but is also rewarding. Managing about 35 staff including 15 contractors emans you get a lot of thing done projectwise but you also spend a lot of time to keep everyone busy and happy. The projects were mostly focussed on delivering standardized Microsoft Collaboration services (AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, Lync) to our enterprise customers (10000-250000 users).

I was personally responsible for the WAN (Wide Area Connection) of all Panasonic locations in Europe and I was at all time aligned with my counterparts in Japan and other regions. After a year the scope of the role was extended to managing of a team of project managers and technical experts in the areas of network, infrastructure and infrastructure applications focusing on regional and global projects.

What an opportunity! I started managing a tiny team of network engineers and ended up managing the whole infrastructure design team including networking, firewalls, data center and system management activities. This was a very technical but not hands-on role where I was responsible not only to come up with business cases but also be project owner and manager at the same time. Good fun and in hindsight many thanks to Al, Lisa and the team! You all were an inspiration to me!