MERIT Awards
By Lisa Leahy, eGov Services
The State of Maine is operating in a challenging environment. More than ever, the Office of Information Technology is critical to the continued mission of delivering efficient and effective services to Maine citizens. Many individuals and many teams have stood out as leaders and role models in this endeavor and we would like to recognize them.
The Maine Excellence Recognition in Information Technology (MERIT) Team Award recognizes the value and importance of multidisciplinary teamwork. The CIO and the IT Executive Committee recognize that such teamwork is vital to advancing citizen service, information sharing, and good government.
The Individual MERIT award recognizes outstanding leadership by an individual who has gone above and beyond in their respective technological area whether the outcome is a service, a product or a dramatic increase in job satisfaction due to this person's contribution.
Deadline:
Nominations must be submitted via e-mail and be received no later than 9/18/08.
Awards Presentation:
Winners will be notified by the Award Team and awards will be presented at the Maine Digital Government Summit on October 6, 2008.
2007 Merit Award Winners:
MERIT Team Award:
IBM Maineframe Support Team
Ann Salverson-Seales and Nick Zaharchuk
Ann and Nick are the only members of this team within the Core Technologies Group.
Working in tandem, these two support the State of Maine 's IBM mainframe environment. This platform supports several critical applications:
- Maine Revenue Service's MATS application
- MFASIS-HR
- DHHS NECSES
The technical environment is incredibly complex. Probably the most remarkable thing of note about this team is that the work they do is largely unkown even inside OIT. Quite simply because they have created and maintained a rock solid application hosting environment. This alone is enough to merit recognition, but it gets even better.
Customers have offered comments like:
"Nick and Ann have the service oriented mindset that frankly, everyone in IT would be well served to emulate"
This is a high performance team focused on service, results and customer satisfaction.
MERIT Individual Award:
Eric Erskine, Systems Team Lead - Department of Transportation
Eric Erskine received the Individual MERIT award for his outstanding work within the Department of Transportation. Eric was responsible for the interface development within DOT for AdvantageME. DOT lost some key business managers last year and Eric picked up the support work that they did. Because of Eric's support and mentoring, construction contractors were paid on time and the new users were able to come up to speed quickly.
Eric implemented a support model inside of DOTs Applications & GIS Support unit where there is enough documentation in a common area that anyone inside this unit can solve a problem with any of the systems. This was proven to work well twice when the key people were out and a problem came up that would have delayed multi-million dollar payments. Staff who had not worked on this system were able to get the problem fixed in time to make the payments.
Eric also implemented a Work Request tracking system that
• takes in user requests for systems work, keeps a status
• is available to DOT users to monitor
• Eric has set aside a week every month for staff to focus on completing these requests.
• Eric's creative reward system to mark this event is homemade chili on the Friday of Work Request Week.
