Face to Face
Jon Ah You
Enterprise Applications Manager

Jon Ah You moved to Anchorage from Hawaii when he was in second grade. His first memory of Alaska was stepping out of the plane in the middle of winter and being fascinated by his frosty breath. He quickly adapted to his new home and has lived in Alaska ever since. Ah You has a business degree from Alaska Pacific University and has held various information technology (IT) positions with Wang Laboratories, BP, the US Army Corps of Engineers and GCI. He first contracted with Alyeska in 1991 and was hired as an employee in 1994. Ah You says he enjoys his job because it is grounded in business and goes way beyond his original perceptions of IT as a programming oriented field. His job is to solve business problems.

Q: What are enterprise systems?

A: Enterprise systems are business applications that support core business functions and are used company-wide across departmental boundaries, including the TAPS Document, PassPort Work Management, Oracle Financials, Intranet (A-Net) and Engineering/Corrosion Data Management systems. These systems rely upon centralized databases, application servers and enterprise networks to process user requests and system transactions. They are supported and maintained by our IT baseline service provider. In contrast, Alyeska also uses desktop applications, sometimes called “productivity tools,” to support individual or workgroup functions. These applications, for example Microsoft Word and Excel, are usually launched directly from a worker’s PC. These two types of applications are often used together to support a specific business process or workflow.

Q: How will strategic reconfiguration impact Alyeska’s information technologies?

A: Reconfiguration will update pipeline components, from valves to communications and power systems, to modernize pipeline operations, maintenance and efficiency. Similarly, Alyeska’s information technology infrastructure and applications need to be retooled, renewed or fitted to support our new business needs. Legacy tools built on obsolete architectures are being decommissioned, such as the mainframe. Additionally, assessments are and will be conducted to determine if the IT tools employed to support pipeline operations and maintenance are still the right tools that will help us achieve desired cost efficiencies. The goal is to increase standardization of technologies, reduce complexity of the architecture, improve ease of access to information and enhance usability of systems. Recently adopted IT strategies should produce these results through standardization of development tools, exploitation of reusable coding practices and use of integration tools to improve access across dissimilar applications and databases