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e-Gov
Employees of the year (behind the scenes)
Name: Assia Alexandrova
(Employee of the year)
Position: Senior Web Designer/County Webmaster
Favorite book of all time: Catcher in the Rye
What she’s reading now: Jorge Luis Borge’s Collected Fictions
Revealing item in purse: Tarot Cards
Portal news. The Kids’ page. Online forms. Content Management.
Ever wonder who’s behind it? Perhaps an omniscient, cyber-God or
Goddess floating in cyberspace commanding all things web. Or
maybe somewhere in a poorly-lit county basement sits a brainy,
bespectacled nerd laboring feverishly at a keyboard at all hours
of the day and night subsisting on a diet of just coffee and
Altoids.
If that’s what you had in mind, you're wrong – and right.
In fact, many “nerds” keep this web afloat. Not all of them wear
glasses, and while many of them enjoy drinking coffee, they do
so in generally well-lit, above ground spaces. Altoids are just
part of a complete, balanced techie’s diet.
Even though there’s no one person behind the website working the
controls, the county’s webmaster, Assia Alexandrova, comes
pretty close. She spends most of her waking hours (and some of
her slumbering ones) thinking, dreaming, examining, tinkering,
planning out something to do with the web. For her dedication,
Assia was recognized as the E-Government employee of the year,
an honor she can add to her long list of accomplishments since
joining the county in 2000.
Assia has designed a number of county websites for departments
including Park and Recreation, Art in Public Places, the Office
of Performance Improvement, Consumer Services, Budget, Ethics,
Community Action Agency and, of course, the e-Government
Department. Her design of kids.miamidade.gov has won Miami-Dade
County recognition the world over. And in a first-of-its-kind
agreement between the county and a municipality, Assia designed
the first-ever website for the City of Sunny Isles Beach. That
agreement has become a prototype for similar agreements with
other municipalities.
What’s Assia up to these days? For starters, she’s heading up a
major transformation in web content management as project
manager for the rollout of TeamSite, a software that will help
streamline, error-proof and warehouse content for the web.
Additionally, she’s part of the core team of professionals that,
in partnership with IBM Corp., is executing a digital branding
strategy that will help residents, businesses and visitors
utilize the county’s technology and services by raising their
awareness of what the county has to offer.
Why does she work so hard. “Because I truly love what I do,”
says Assia. But does she have a life? “I know this is going to
sound terribly demented, but I make no distinction between my
work life and my home life.”
What does the future hold for Assia? We’ll just have to wait and
see what the Tarot cards say.
Name: Jay Alvarez de la Campa
(Employee of the year
runner-up)
Position: Senior Systems Analyst Programmer
Favorite book of all time: In Search of Excellence: Lessons from
America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas Peters
What he’s reading now: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor
Frankl
Which animal best describes his personality: A fox because he’s
clever and sly.
Recently, we posed the following question to Miami-Dade
residents: “What would make interacting with the county easier?”
One resident replied: “Put everything online.”
In very simple terms that’s exactly what Jay Alvarez does. He
puts every county service or business process people can think
of online.
In 2003, Jay was runner-up Employee of Year, but just barely. As
part of the Rapid Applications Development Team (imagine the
A-Team, but for applications) Jay had a hand in almost every
important technological development in 2002.
Most notably, he
pulled together in just three weeks the hordes of resources
needed to develop a computer application that tracked and
deployed more than 5,000 county employees to more than 500
precincts in the county during the November 2002 elections.
It’s
one thing to have the know-how, but what made the outcome a
success, according to June Randall, Assistant Director of the e-Government department, was Jay’s willingness to roll up his
sleeves and work side by side with the team to get the job done.
That’s just the way he does it.
When he’s not saving the world, Jay leads a team of programmers
who develop applications that keep the county running each and
every day. In 2002, that team delivered Phase I of the
E-Procurement, an application that has transformed the way the
county does business with vendors. In a survey of E-Procurement
users, more than 95 percent of those who responded would
recommend the application to others.
Wily Jay and company are working on the next phase of
E-Procurement which will employ clever ways to help county
procurement professionals build solicitations and award sheets,
search county contracts and provide a repository of county
contracts.
Name: Julian Albo,
Jr.
(Employee of the year
runner-up)
Title: Systems Analyst II
Favorite book of all time: Kon-Tiki by explorer/navigator Thor
Heyerdahl
What he’s reading right now: C++
What he keeps on his desk: Sweets – M&Ms, lollipops, Hershey’s
Kisses
You don’t have to be Christopher Columbus to appreciate a good
map. From cabdrivers to soccer moms, from house hunters to
homeowners, maps are becoming “cool” – at least the electronic
ones.
Julian Albo Jr.’s job is all about using maps to improve the
quality of life for everyday people. He’s part of the county’s
GIS application & Web development team and he was also recently
named the 2nd Runner-up e-Government employee of the year. This
means that in the event that the Employee of the Year and the
1st Runner-up are unable to fulfill their eGov duties, Julian
will step in and… Well, not really. What it really means is that
Julian is in good company and has significantly contributed to
the county’s growing portfolio of mapping applications. Among
them, My Home, My Neighborhood, and My Business. What’s more,
most of the programming used in DERM’s Artificial Reefs
application came from My Neighborhood.
We know what you’re thinking: “But what did he do for
elections?”
Julian had a lead role in developing the “In Command”
application used, among other things, to automatically update
precinct status using instant messaging features. It, too,
incorporated GIS principles to ensure that the county was ready
for voters.
Julian has been described by his peers as “a supervisor’s dream
– hardworking, knowledgeable, reliable, attentive, helpful, and
awesomely productive.” His dad, Julian Albo, Sr., senior
operating system programmer, has nothing but pride for Julian
Jr. and says he’s amazed by his son’s talents. “I’m learning
from him,” he says.
We all are.
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