Today’s interview is with Rusty Pickens, senior advisor for Digital Platforms for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. Pickens is one of those rare individuals who started out of college working a help desk and wound up working in the White House.

This means that he is grounded in the technical aspects of moving to the cloud (MSCE, CCNA, PMI, AWS, Certified Scum Master, Salesforce Certified Developer) as well as having the ability to work through the human problems and work in collaboration with other teams to integrate complex systems.

During the interview Pickens talks about a challenge he had at the White House with moving a correspondence managing system to the cloud.  Some agencies may have room for mistakes, but if there is a mistake made with White House correspondence, then it is discussed on the front page of major newspapers.

Pickens shares with listeners his involvement with a Community of Excellence where fellow federal IT professionals can share trials, tribulations, and successes with others in a “judgement free” environment.  Listen to the interview to see how to bring together various stakeholders in a high pressure environment.

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