Announcement: This is how an IT engineer works with important social projects

How do you create systems that take better care of the population? And what needs to be improved the next time an epidemic hits?

These are the questions architect Christian Allnas works with every day as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Works in multidisciplinary teams with several socially significant projects. Something that helps make everyday life rewarding and exciting.

– The main reason I wanted to join PwC was because I wanted a working day where I could interact with professionals in other fields. On my projects here, I often collaborate with both lawyers and economists to find the best solutions for clients.

Having obtained a master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Oslo, it might have been very natural to think that Christian would choose an academic career, but for him it was the IT industry that seduced him.

Exciting collaboration

Christian and his team work with many clients who operate IT systems critical to society. Here they must find out, among other things, whether systems should be renewed, whether other solutions are needed to take better care of the population and figure out what should be better – for example, if we are going to be hit by an epidemic again.

Kristian works in consulting, more specifically he belongs to the Business Technology team working on many different platforms and cloud technology solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

– It’s important for us to have deep expertise in the most important solutions out there, says Christian.

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Socio-economists, for example, can go in and see the relevance of the advice that has come from the health sector to society as a whole. And so we see bigger multiplier effects than just within the health sector, based on the data that they have access to. He says I wouldn’t encounter this in a traditional IT company.

– The work is also very technical and even as an Architect you are involved in building solutions with continuous deliveries delivered using containers. In order to know what we’re planning, we need to prototype what we’re going to do, he adds. As an architect, he himself works on a daily basis with development in, say, C# or TypeScript.

You must be willing to ask the big questions and know that there are not always easy answers.

Clouds and server rooms

The IT industry is an ever-changing industry, and those who work with technology today have very different experiences. Some people still remember well the time when you needed large rooms to collect all the necessary information on servers, while others were almost born in a world with the Internet and cloud technology. Christian belongs to the latter group. cloud dwellers.

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– When I got down to business, I think it was hard to understand what it was like before. Maybe I didn’t understand all the challenges facing companies and agencies that had rooms full of computers in their basements. I didn’t think that was something to be concerned with, for example, power outages, floods, and lightning, he says.

His team’s work with the Norwegian Electoral Service has made this clear. Because there is information that is so secret that it must be protected from other countries, and when an election is held, one must know that all results will arrive regardless of the situation in the country.

— and though it’s easier and more profitable to gather information in the clouds today, such systems are still essential, he says.

The big questions

With different backgrounds, everyone can contribute, and according to Christian, the IT industry is good at sharing knowledge. He himself is part of many topic-sharing networks in his spare time, and there he meets colleagues and other people who are interested in information technology to exchange knowledge and discuss. This is also useful in a work context.

– Here, for example, those who work with the FHI and the Directorate of Health and Health in the Southeast can meet and discuss what is needed to bring the health sector to the level it should be from a technological point of view. We can share experiences in terms of technology, and together contribute to making everyone better, he says.

And again, it’s the community that’s exciting – just as it is in everyday life at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

– If you are looking for a job where you can work with everything related to the IT industry and come up with a technical perspective in collaboration with lawyers, economists and security experts, this is the right workplace for you. At the same time, he concludes, you must be a consultant who loves to be challenged and finds it exciting to work with the biggest challenges and technical questions.