Pros
-I was fortunate to have an amazing manager that gets it (need for processes, empowers employees, doing the right thing, not overloading employees). -There is plenty of work and opportunity to wear many hats. -Hours are very reasonable. Work from home Fridays.
Cons
-The business is a stale environment. Innovation is stifled and not an exciting place to be. -Fundamental issues with senior leadership team's view of technology. Historically, the company spends only 30% compared to what companies of comparable size spend in IT. The new CIO of AJG indicated that the senior leadership team see's their industry as a "relationship" business and does not see how technology can be their competitive edge "yet". Good news is that the CIO has an action plan and made it his goal to convince the senior leadership team to invest more in IT and use it as a competitive advantage. There are signs of improvement. The company has hired a lot of new smart people over the last year to assess the industry and create a Roadmap for IT. However, was surprised that this wasn't already in place since the company has been around for 50 years.. -The lack of understanding Account managers have of how clients can benefit from analytics and how to proactively foresee their clients need results in non-innovative requirements and dull BI development. -The underinvestment in IT has resulted in the company running sort of between a startup and a semi-mature company. Very limited IT governance processes, no enterprise architecture group, no architecture reviews or standards for infrastructure. No processes in the group I was in, but have implemented standards and processes since then.