Page 50 - FCW, November/December 2020

Rising Stars
preservation of privacy in data analysis.
Her supervisor said Boeckl is “one of those employees
who doesn’t tout her own efforts because she always thinks she could have done better,” and the range of skills she used to help develop the Privacy Framework and launch the collaboration space far exceeded the expectations of an employee at her pay grade.
LIZ DEAN
Senior UX Strategist MetroStar Systems
The National Institutes of Health’s governmentwide acquisition contract system is a cornerstone of federal IT, and Liz Dean is committed to making it work better for both contract holders and government customers.
As a key player in MetroStar Systems’ work with
the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center, Dean is responsible for ensuring a positive, productive user experience with the NITAAC website and its Electronic Government Ordering System (e-GOS). In her first year on the project, she worked with clients and development teams to reimagine
the catalog for the CIO-CS GWAC for IT commodity products, the process by which contract holders enter their award information and the user’s journey through the e-GOS solicitation process.
Dean repeatedly jumped in wherever help was needed — conducting user acceptance testing for all software enhancements, for example. She also made a point of sharing key knowledge with others and led application training for colleagues.
She continually looks for opportunities to move projects along, and her efforts are helping NITAAC expand and enabling MetroStar to apply lessons learned to other government projects.
KELSEY WERDER MONAGHAN
Federal Account Manager, Department of Energy and NASA Dell Technologies
Consolidating IT infrastructure is a challenge for
any organization. At an agency as decentralized and technology-intensive as NASA, the task is even more daunting. Dell Technologies’ Kelsey Werder Monaghan is proving essential to that effort.
She worked with NASA officials to launch a single cloud operating model at two primary sites with the goals of improving agility for space and research programs and strengthening the agency’s Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act score. The new architecture combines hundreds of physical and virtual servers, includes infinitely scalable object storage and unifies the infrastructure with Dell’s connecting fabric.
In addition, Monaghan collaborated with 11
critical stakeholders at varying levels within NASA
to consolidate disparate compute, storage and licensing agreements into one enterprise offering. Her advocacy and the customer trust she built facilitated collaborations with Splunk, channel partners, and multiple CIOs and organizations within NASA.
Those efforts helped enable a range of new capabilities for NASA, including an on-premises cloud offering, AI-powered analytics and agile cybersecurity. The project also reduced operating costs and the time to result for multiple NASA missions.
Finally, Monaghan and her team worked closely with the Cybersecurity and Privacy Division in NASA’s Office of the CIO to help ensure a consistent security policy, strengthen risk-based security controls and track key security metrics to gauge compliance and effectiveness.
50 November/December 2020 FCW.COM