The Web's Master Builders

If you've worked through the paradigm from back-office implementations to Web development and thrown in some project management and business process flow skills, then you may be ripe for a job as an Internet architect -- a lucrative new profession that's earning some as much as $125,000 per year.

By Deborah Radcliff

March 13, 2000 12:00 PM ET

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Just the Facts

Responsibilities:

Development of customer applications, Web servers and back-office infrastructure linkage; management of project deliverables, cross-unit communication and training, says Peter O'Keefe, a staffing specialist at Romac Information Technology, a consulting firm in Tampa, Fla.

Skills:

High-level e-commerce project management

Business analysis

Database management systems; Visual Basic and VB Script

Back-office system integration (including legacy work)

ERP implementation

Java, JavaBean, C++, Perl, Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Component Object Model/Distributed Component Object Model, HTML, Unix, Linux and Windows NT

Understanding of telecommunications networking

Understanding of Web security infrastructure

Career path:

Most gain their skills through consulting on bleeding-edge projects. Typical employers are consulting and e-commerce start-ups, according to Kent Brown, a recruiter at Pencom Systems Inc.'s Chicago office.

Salary range:

$85,000 to $125,000, based on experience, seniority and the type of company, says Brown.

Who: Shailja Dhruva-Khatri

Company: Teleremote.com, a health care business-to-business e-commerce start-up in Chicago

Previous title: E-commerce project lead, independent consultant

Reports to: Chief technology officer

Key skill: Thoroughly understand business objectives and match those to the optimum technology path. And once you've completed that analysis, don't shy away from telling executives the most efficient path to take.After about five years of Internet integration and Web work, Shailja Dhruva-Khatri amassed the right combination of vertical industry and bleeding-edge skills to tackle the position of senior Internet architect at an e-commerce start-up.

Fully aware of the rigors, she accepted a full-time position in January at Teleremote.com for three reasons: challenge, potential and the promise of working in wireless and other cutting-edge technologies down the road.

Web marketing is giving way to true, transactional e-commerce. Leaders of these e-commerce projects will be responsible for the underpinnings of the e-commerce strategy itself.

For nine years, Dhruva-Khatri has been evolving her skills to get to this point. And now, as senior Internet architect, she's heading an ambitious project in the health care industry.

Her skills mirror those of many technologists who make a point of staying on the frontier of technology. In 1991, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a master's degree in computer engineering. Her first job was building user-friendly graphical user interfaces for an aeronautics firm.

A Different View

Later, as a consultant, Dhruva-Khatri learned to look at computer systems from a business point of view.

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