McKesson? Who’s McKesson?

Many people who hear that I work for McKesson say they don’t know the name. Fair enough – I didn’t know it when I applied for my position here either. So here are a few tidbits to give you an idea what McKesson is if you’re curious.

June 19th there is a free webcast of a conversation with the CEO and CIO of McKesson. You can sign up here. I doubt anyone will (should) sign up, but the preview (silly Flash format!) gives you a very brief glimpse at what this company is trying to do, or what they claim they’re trying to do (other than make money – naturally). Yes, Randy Spratt said over $80 billion in revenue – that’s a lot of money.

I work in a business unit called “Medical Imaging Group”, or MIG. You can find their website here. Originally MIG was an independent software vendor (ALI Technologies) who was purchased by McKesson some years ago to add to their portfolio of products – specifically medical imaging products. The office is located in Richmond, a 30 minute drive from home (traffic permitting).

My position is officially called “Functional Analyst”, though some refer to us as Business Analysts in other companies. You can see a general description of what an FA does in a current job posting here. I work in the infrastructure side of the team, rather than the clinical. So I look at how our products work behind the scenes, or for user who aren’t clinical such as hospital site administrators. This quote is pretty much the job description:

The Functional Analyst (FA) reviews customer business problems and develops high level use cases and requirements that drive the development teams efforts to meet customer and business needs. The FA authors, publishes and facilitates review of requirements and establishes and maintains requirements traceability. The role of Functional Analyst (FA) is to be the product clinical or technical expert that ensures that customer’s (and other stakeholders) needs are met via product requirement documents. The FA is typically an expert at understanding the details of customer workflows and is able to translate these needs into high level use cases and requirements which drive the development process.

Just a little blurb about my work, as I seem to spend a significant amount of time doing it. As you can see I have moved on from technical support (finally) and am now working in Product Management – sounds auspicious, but see my previous post about demotivational sayings to get an idea of some of the new challenges I’m seeing in my new role.

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