Features Region: Southwest

As Abe Alirez was growing up, he dreamt of driving a truck—hauling loads of freight that help keep the economy going while seeing the U.S. along its highways and byways. Alirez also loved technology. He wasn’t old enough to drive a truck, but he was old—and skilled enough—to repair his friends’ video game systems. For […]

Jeff Scheetz likes to joke that he moved from his native Colorado to Avondale, Arizona, to escape the snow. He’s done that, although it also means he left some of his favorite fishing streams behind when he became chief information officer for the city of 89,334 that’s on the western boundary of Phoenix. However, Scheetz […]

Six months after joining the City of New Braunfels, Texas, in 2018 as its director of information technology, Tony Gonzalez was brought into a meeting where an idea was presented to replace the city’s enterprise resource planning system. Understanding this project was going to have a price tag of $1.5 million to $2 million, Gonzalez […]

For months, tacked above Jalen Byford’s desk at the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services was a huge map of Oklahoma that he got from the state tourism department. Byford had plastered it with pushpins and Post-it notes denoting places where he had already installed technicians as well as places where he still needed […]

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 […]

When the Jane Phillips Sorority Credit Union was founded in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1939, members could open savings accounts with a quarter and borrow up to $50 in an unsecured loan. Back then, Treasurer Mildred Hunt handled credit union business at her desk at Phillips Petroleum Co. at lunch or after hours, too. Times have […]

W hen Amplify Snack Brands was acquired by Hershey in early 2018, the company’s IT team began integrating with the candy giant’s systems and infrastructure. When this was completed in January 2020, the team had no idea how fortuitous its timing was. “It worked out perfectly for the pandemic,” IT Director Jorge Barroso says. “We […]

When Wayne Craig first worked as a field technician in the petrochemical industry in the Houston area, he spent his days in the field helping design, install and document projects. In the evenings, he made plan changes on a drawing board. Then computer-aided design, or CAD, software programs used in mainframe computers became available on […]

At the start of her career, Kasey Ortoski knew she was helping society as a teacher, spending nearly half a decade imparting knowledge to kindergarteners as well as second and fourth graders. Since leaving the classroom in 2019, she’s found a new way to make an impact—as a contract operations manager handling IT at Jacobs. […]

It’s safe to say very few tech leaders have worked in PR at a Pakistani hospital that treated victims of leprosy. But Feroz Merchhiya says it was an invaluable experience in his professional development—and a humbling one at that. “My journey is not a typical journey for someone who ended up in technology,” says Feroz […]