My big news to report: After 6 years at Synergist Technology Group, Inc., I am changing directions. I have accepted a position at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Information. I will be starting at USEPA the week of April 26th, 2010.
I greatly enjoyed the work I was doing at Synergist, having been involved in everything from business development to writing code and everything in between, supporting geospatial, mapping and integration efforts to support diverse business areas from environmental protection to emergency response to transportation to military and intelligence applications. I enjoyed the diversity.
I have worked in private sector, consulting for over 20 years, but all throughout this, have always been solutions-focused, and have always had a keen interest in supporting the core mission of the agencies that I worked with - though, the downside of private sector consulting is always in the vagaries of its' occasionally fragmentary nature, with competetive bidding and teaming arrangements often dynamic and changing.
So, coming into Federal service brings a whole gamut of new things. In some ways, I will get to dig deep into some of my core passions of environmental protection, geospatial technology and integration - and I look forward to this. However, it will surely bring many other challenges along with it - but I am up for any challenge.
My new role will, among other things, involve support to EPA's Facility Registry System (FRS), which is a repository for facilities data for 2.5 million unique facilities regulated under a variety of environmental laws and statutes. Herein, I see opportunity for further geo-enablement of Agency business processes, along with continued integration potential, to put hooks and eyes into a variety of other processes for ever-improving analytical, reporting and querying capabilities, cross-media, cross-agency, cross-domain, cross-dimension, as well as facilitating further partnership-building, between local, state, and federal government, tribes, academia, industry and the public, and supporting data publishing, OGI and transparency initiatives.
I anticipate I will also be pulled into a variety of other geospatial efforts across EPA as well... In many ways, I will essentially continue to do many of the things I already did - only, from the other side of the fence. In terms of physical logistics, I have already essentially been commuting to Washington DC for 6 years - though, now having a permanent duty station there, I can now consider getting a place to stay, as opposed to living out of hotels and bouncing between various locales as I have been.
So - mixed emotions - I will certainly miss working with Synergist, but likewise, there is a great team at EPA, and I am sure I will have a great time there.
Here's another exiting bit of news - my firm is teamed with CGI Federal on USEPA's Software Engineering & Specialized Scientific Support (SES3) Contract, and we just got word that our team has won EPA's 
As such - we also anticipate we will be looking to grow as a company, and will be looking to hire additional technical gurus with capabilities in data exchange, data management and data flows, particularly if you have prior capabilities and knowledge of EPA's Exchange Network and CDX, and/or geospatial technology.
It tends to make providing detailed attribute information a disincentive, and steers folks toward taking the cop-out approach of just providing the overview description. Seems like an opportunity lost.
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