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Rina Levy

One doesn't go from Tel Aviv to Brussels, and across the Atlantic to Boston and then to the Washington, D.C., area—the route Rina Levy's career path has followed—without being able to learn quickly and assimilate with new people and surroundings.

It's hard to imagine a better setting for Levy than MITRE, with its roster of employees drawn from all over the world. And the first project to which she was assigned—developing an enterprise architecture (EA) for the Peace Corps—seems equally well suited.

Levy, a systems engineer in MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM), is leading a team that will help the Peace Corps enhance its technological capability to meet present and future business needs. It's an irresistible challenge. She gets the opportunity to establish MITRE expertise with a new customer. And she gets to work with a client that has a multicultural cast and an idealistic bent—a welcome environment for someone with Levy's technical expertise and familiarity with different cultures.

"They're entrepreneurial, and they're very nice people," she says of Peace Corps employees. "They're culturally very diverse. If you walk into the Peace Corps office, it's like walking into a travel agency."

CEM is helping the Peace Corps improve its technical and business structure, which will enable it to meet President Bush's goal of doubling the ranks of volunteers within a five-year period. The agency is looking for better ways to recruit and train volunteers, match them with countries that can best use their talents, and move them safely out of the host country if needed.

Despite her relative newness to MITRE (she's been here almost a year), Levy is confident she can handle that challenge successfully. So are her colleagues. "She's put a lot of energy into her work here at MITRE, and she's put a lot of thought into it," says Reed Mihaloew, an information systems engineer with CEM. "It was not something she was doing by osmosis."

Levy has brought to MITRE over two decades of experience in advanced system and EA development, as well as technical management of large software systems. She worked previously at GE Information Services and American Management Systems, and then started her own software company, Pointer International, Inc., (which she sold before joining MITRE). During those years, she learned a number of lessons that will serve her well at MITRE: the need to establish good working relationships with colleagues and customers, the importance of deep technical knowledge, and the value of learning new subject matter quickly.

Those were lessons she wasted no time applying during her first days at MITRE.

"I practiced management by walking around, and I literally introduced myself to people in their offices," Levy says. "By developing personal connections, I was able to find the expertise I needed to help me with this project. I wanted to bring the best of MITRE to the Peace Corps."

As work on the Peace Corps project goes forward, Levy continues to look at how the emerging concept of EA can be further refined. She helped start a program involving 16 students at Syracuse University who are working with the Peace Corps and MITRE to develop a prototype visual model of the Peace Corps EA. The hope is that the model will facilitate innovative development of future EA projects. She has also written a grant proposal for a research project which seeks to define more clearly the roles of different people who will be implementing and using an EA.

"She had to talk to people who knew the MITRE process well to get involved in that," says Mihaloew. "She's really put some effort into her assimilation, rather than just letting it happen. That was a very smart thing to do."

Levy's transition to MITRE and government clients has gone smoothly, helped by her technical knowledge and proactive approach to learning the job. Her motivation for coming to MITRE included a desire to work with gifted and dedicated people and to strike a work-life balance that would allow her more time with her three children. She hasn't been disappointed.

"Some things are beyond my expectations," she says. "The people here are really caring and very knowledgeable. They like what they do. People care about quality, doing things right. It's exactly what I had asked for in a place to work."

And the Peace Corps? Levy says she will do her part to get more people in the program—by encouraging her children to become volunteers.