UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As an IT business partner for Boeing, Megan Tucker is the focal point for one of the company’s new defense helicopter programs. She works between the program and the enterprise to ensure all IT requirements are met and communicated. Tucker earned a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and technology at Penn State in 2018 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in information systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University. During her time at Penn State, Tucker was the president for Women in IST and event coordinator for IST diplomats.
How are you using your IST skills and education to make an impact in the travel and transportation industry?
IST gives you the skillset to effectively communicate between different areas of both the IT and business worlds. The lessons learned from team projects and presentations required throughout each of the IST classes helped me to better learn how to collaborate closely with many different people on different teams and how to deliver presentations on technical subjects to stakeholders with many different backgrounds.
What are the top current information technology trends in your industry? What are the primary needs and concerns?
Some of the top technologies working to be employed include creating a digital thread architecture and digital twin aircraft. The digital thread requires systems to be integrated in order to have data flowing real time between many different applications. Digital twin is a digital representation of the aircraft created by mass amounts of real-time data to allow for easier testing and validation of the aircraft via virtual simulations. Both of these ideas and technologies are relatively new, so most of the software offerings for meeting those requirements are still immature and require a lot of testing and development to meet those end-goals at a large scale.
Through your role, how are you working to advance these trends and/or address these needs and concerns?
I work closely with our IT enterprise team and our suppliers to ensure that the requirements and need dates identified by the program are communicated while recognizing these technologies will become more mature over multiple iterations of development. I also help with minimum viable product (MVP) implementations and track the progress of the requirements overtime.
Why did you decide to apply your degree in the travel and transportation industry?
I interned for Boeing my sophomore year of college and loved the company, so I decided to return for a full-time job. I always thought the aerospace and defense industry was exciting and saw so much innovation happening there that I wanted to be a part of.
What motivates you in your work?
I love the aspect of having to work through really difficult problems with many other very intelligent people. There’s no feeling quite like finally being able to work through one of those problems and seeing work that you contributed to completed and making an impact.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I really enjoy knowing I’m contributing to a much larger team with the tangible end goal of creating a helicopter if we operate successfully. Watching the helicopters in flight test and leave for delivery is extremely exciting.
What information technology changes, advances or needs do you envision in your industry in the next 5-10 years? How are you poised to address them in your role? How is your company/industry as a whole?
There are a lot of changes in the way we do design and engineering work being implemented that will become much more mature and widely used in 5-10 years. The goal is to shift these things to being model based, allowing for the concept of model-based engineering. There will be many new requirements with the software we use to create requirements, systems diagrams, and aircraft designs which our company is addressing by starting to customize and implement a new suite of engineering tools that will enable these capabilities. The industry as a whole is also shifting to using suppliers that create software with these capabilities and are working to slowly implement them throughout different programs.
How does the College of IST prepare its graduates for professional success in a broad range of industries?
IST gives you a wide knowledge base of many different areas of the IT world which allows you to pick any path and industry that you find interesting and want to develop more into.