Features July 2023

As quarantines swept the nation at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, students of Charles County, Maryland, were sent home—and Lora Bennett had to act quickly. As the executive director of information technology strategy for Charles County Public Schools, she had a find a way to enable students to learn from the comfort and safety […]

As executive director of Concurrent Technologies Corp.’s Information Technology Division, Kevin Pudliner isn’t always at liberty to talk about his team’s work. He can, however, say they’ve played crucial roles in assisting the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies analyze data by developing algorithms that can also detect malware attacks. Pudliner and his team […]

As tech leaders, Alex Magdics and Scott Bauer are both Men of Steel and a Dynamic Duo in their roles at Majestic Steel. Superman and Batman comics aside, they have teamed up to provide technology innovations and solutions for Majestic Steel for more than a decade. Bauer, who was the first full-time IT employee when […]

How it helps to know the nuances of a profession before transitioning to a supportive role. So says Sarah Slipetz who spent the early years of her career as a registered nurse, getting a clogs-on-the-floor look at how inefficiencies were built into almost any healthcare system. Her colleagues and patients deserved better, she says. “I’ll […]

Denise Figueroa had to look up Oklahoma on a map when she applied to work for the state’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services in 2021. When she got the call for an interview, she asked twice about where they were calling from because she hadn’t expected a response. Then, when she got the job […]

As festivals go, this one won’t conjure up memories of Woodstock, Live Aid or Coachella. No one gets inundated by storms causing seas of mud, no rock stars take jets to play multiple venues in a day, and the setting is south central Virginia, not the California desert. But John Collins has very high hopes […]

One chilly morning in January 2020, Tony Neumann got the call every IT director dreads. Some strange splash screens—also known as boot or welcome screens—were popping up on devices given to employees of the City of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where Neumann has worked since 1999. Before long, staffers couldn’t use their devices. Neumann tried to remote […]

Having spent over a decade in cybersecurity, Nicholas Schopperth has pretty much seen it all. But when one hacker went after the direct deposit information of his colleague at Dayton Children’s Hospital, the mild-mannered Air Force veteran got mad. “I don’t like when people bully my people,” Schopperth says. “So, I called the bank, because […]