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Marianne Thiffault |
Mom Appreciates the Many Opportunities at MITRE
Marianne Thiffault
September 2006
The willingness to grab onto interesting opportunities, a desire
to learn new technologies, and—for the last decade—a
love of Web work all have guided Marianne Thiffault's MITRE career.
Thiffault started at MITRE in 1978 as an entry-level support staff
and spent the next 15 years working her way up through the administrative
ranks while balancing the many demands of a job and a growing family.
As her career progressed, she had various opportunities to expand
her work responsibilities and take on additional challenges—challenges
that ultimately led her to a new career path.
With the rapid proliferation of Internet technologies in the mid-1990s,
Thiffault saw an opportunity to expand her skills into the then-new
area of Web development. She became a technical project assistant
developing departmental Web pages. Her success in this area led
to a position on the team that created the Inaugural Management
Information Portal project (IMIP).
The IMIP was a MITRE-developed tool used by the Washington, D.C.,
Emergency Management Agency during the 2001 Presidential Inauguration.
The easy-to-use, password-protected portal gave officials involved
in safety, security, and crisis management immediate access to information
that would facilitate coordinated operations during the inauguration.
The following year, the IMIP team adapted the portal for use in
the 2002 Boston Marathon.
"For both the IMIP and the Boston Marathon projects, my job focused
on the Web applications," she says. "I knew that this was the type
of project work I wanted to pursue." As these projects drew to a
close, Thiffault was asked to support the pilot team for MITRE's
Community Share project. She didn't hesitate to accept the offer.
Community Share—Collaboration at Its Best
MITRE's Community Share is the company-wide collaboration platform
designed to enhance the productivity of teams. "It's a tool for
collaborating with team members—it provides a single place
for sharing documents, tracking tasks, posting event listings, and
holding discussions. We encourage all our employees to use it.
"When I was first asked to join the Community Share team, it was
a pilot project with only about 100 sites on the company's intranet,"
she continues. "I was one of the first liaisons, and it was my job
to interact and provide support to the end users. From there I did
some basic training with one of the consultants and learned the
SharePoint application [the Microsoft application on which Community
Share is based]. I also attended meetings with the developers and
worked closely with them during testing prior to the various rollouts.
"Now we have more than 1,000 top-level sites on the intranet. After
the intranet pilot was complete, we implemented a similar pilot
project on the extranet. These external sites allow sponsors and
customers the opportunity to collaborate securely with MITRE staff
outside of the corporate firewall. Now there are approximately 100
sites on the Community Share extranet."
While Thiffault continues to spend about half her time helping
users as a Community Share liaison, she spends the other half of
her time supporting the new MITRE Cross Boundary Information Sharing
Laboratory (XBIS Lab). Like Community Share, the XBIS Lab is an
information sharing tool, but it also supports integrated operational
scenarios and technology integration and experimentation.
Flexibility is Key
Thiffault is quick to credit her managers over the years with giving
her the flexibility to alter her career path, raise her children,
and continue working in various capacities and on different schedules.
"I've really had great leadership," she says. "My managers have
always believed in me—their faith in my abilities gave me
the confidence to tackle new challenges."
She continues, "I've worked a lot of different schedules over the
years and this type of flexibility has been fantastic. The ability
to work from home when necessary and all the technology tools available—logging
in from home, forwarding office calls to my home phone, instant
messaging with colleagues, emails alerting me to voice mail—these
tools make a flexible schedule a reality."
Thiffault points out that while MITRE is full of opportunities,
it's up to the individual to capitalize on them. "At many points
in my career I was given various opportunities. Whatever I wanted
to learn I was able to. When I needed software training, I took
classes either outside the company or at the MITRE Institute [the
company's internal educational resource]. When given an opportunity,
I took advantage of it through my own initiative."
Thiffault's enthusiasm for both her work and for MITRE is clearly
evident. "The work is interesting and there are always opportunities
to learn and grow with new technologies. Add to that the flexibility
and supportive atmosphere MITRE offers and you can see why I think
MITRE is such a great place to work."
—by Kay M. Upham
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