Information Technology

Greg Jackson, Executive Director, Tangent
Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent
Marc Kilgus, Project Quality Manager, Tangent
David Winterbottom, Senior Developer, Tangent
Hannah Mearns, Developer, Tangent
Christoph Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore

Narrator: The diversity of roles within IT is vast due to the growth in the industry over the last ten years. Depending on the type of business, the roles and skills that are required change considerably.

Greg Jackson, Executive Director, Tangent: Tangent's a group of companies which provide a range of technology and communication services mainly to other businesses be they small or big, around the UK and around the world.

Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent: At the start of the process, there's a - there's a group of people who sort of, kick off the whole thing. That ranges from information architects, usually somebody who has sort of, a client interest, who supports the client's view in the process. A creative vision, which comes from a designer or creative director and then there will be technical support as well. So probably a lead developer.

Marc Kilgus, Project Quality Manager, Tangent: A Project quality manager guides the whole project, so for the whole project lifecycle and guides the project manager from the beginning to the end. So I am kind of supporting the project manager and more on a perspective on the quality.

Peter Miller, Senior Designer, Tangent: As a senior designer, my job role is to take "Y" frames which are you know, they are single layouts and transform them with incorporating look and feel, which is you know, how the visual elements of things like colour and scale and contrast. Incorporate all those things to create a final user interface, that then gets incorporated by our developers into a website.

David Winterbottom, Senior Developer, Tangent: A senior developer is responsible for a small team of other developers normally about four or five here and the role is to manage their work load in terms of that what they're doing going to assign tasks to them and to audit the work that they produce, but also to work with them on particular tasks perhaps by programming with them at the same computer.

Hannah Mearns, Developer, Tangent: A developer's role can be different in different companies. My role here would be to take part of the creative brief and the designs the designers here provide me with and make it work. So, I can be in charge of database structure or the functionality which runs behind a website. So user accounts and e-commerce transactions. I would also be responsible for the visual that you see when you visit the websites. So all of the boxes and the forms and images.

Narrator: With all of this technology used within businesses, it's important that the infrastructure is maintained to ensure that the system continues to work effectively. This would be the role of the system support.

Christoph Meslin, Head of Systems Support, Framestore: Well, my role is to head a team of Linux engineers. We look after the infrastructure of the whole company and by infrastructure I mean the network which is, you know, essential for, you know, linking all the computers together all the servers, all the storage, all the render farm and we also look after all those servers, all that storage which is quite enormous, because you know, of the number of projects that we've got running concurrently and the enormous render farm that we need to produce these images 24/7.

Hannah Mearns, Developer, Tangent: This wasn't what I train to do, I did something else entirely from my degree and then found that I was interested in this and I tend to find that most people in this area are as well of the same because there has been no specific degree relating to web design or web development up until now. These things are starting to come in, I believe, but like most people in the field, it's a personal interesting. So I would, well don't tell my employee this, I will do this for free because I enjoy it so much.

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