September 2012 Employee of the Month

Meet John, a BWC software development specialist

When John Nielsen has a goal to achieve, nothing stands in his way.

That's why he's our September Employee of the Month. He's part of the planning team that conducts necessary research and investigation to build plans for the Information Technology Division's infrastructure, and he led storage platform research for our Core systems replacement project.

John painstakingly investigated our existing, fully redundant enterprise storage environment and recommended we upgrade to a faster, more capable and efficient storage network — for roughly the cost of one year's maintenance on the older system. John's timely, meticulous analysis, coupled with good old-fashioned hard work, caused co-worker and infrastructure specialist Jeff Popio to nominate him for BWC Employee of the Month.

"[John's] diligent research and desire to find the best solution for BWC and its customers should literally save the bureau more than a million dollars over the next five years,” said Jeff in his nomination. "Throughout the process the nominee demonstrated the clear ability to remain impartial and was able to obtain consensus to choose the best solution for BWC. The nominee went above and beyond normal duties, learning new skills and bringing himself up to speed on storage technologies in only about two months."

Chief Information Officer Tom Croyle was also impressed with John's storage study. "John has considerable technical expertise, but also is uniquely able to research new technology quickly," said Tom. "Recently, we called on John to research hardware options for the Core systems project which had an immediate need. Despite having a limited background on the topic, John very quickly was able to objectively present several viable options that included a thorough analysis of costs, risks and performance data."

John, a BWC employee for more than 15 years, was surprised and excited by his honor. "It's so cool that BWC recognizes the hard work that we're putting through with Core systems," he said.

What makes John's conscientious effort even more amazing? He finished a good bit of this research — and compiled supporting budgetary reports — while he was home recovering from ACL surgery.

"The day after my surgery, we still had a deadline to push through," he said. "We had no more time left. It was an amazing feeling to get it done and finally get it approved."

Sure, cost and storage issues drove John to look for new solutions. But more importantly, he knew that BWC's sensitive and priceless injured worker and employer data were the real issues. He calls this information the "life-blood of the agency," and said our previous mainframe centric environment was not set up to support that level of importance in the Core infrastructure. "The techniques we were using at the time to deal with data weren't appropriate for what we have now," he said. "We have to protect this information. So we had to do something about that — we had to fix it."

It's this dedication and consistent work ethic that fuels John's customer service commitment. But he credits the help and input of his co-workers, who are also his favorite aspect of working here.

"The professional, energetic IT staff that I work with — and the friendly employees at BWC — provide a good setting for an environment in which to learn, grow and make things better," he said.