Murtaza Ahmed

Murtaza Ahmed is on a long-term mission to modernize IT at the Environmental Protection Agency. As a senior program manager at Lockheed Martin, he helped EPA move from Lotus Notes email to a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 suite last year. This year, he helped EPA migrate its collaboration software to a cloud-based SharePoint environment.

And in the past few months, EPA completed a mobile upgrade to iPhones and Windows-based smartphones with his help.

"We definitely want to take EPA to a more mobile workforce concept," Ahmed said, and the move to the cloud for EPA's 24,000 users is almost complete.

The next challenge is to create a mobile device management tool, set to be in place by January. That sort of large-scale logistical IT project sounds like a full-time job all by itself, but Ahmed's responsibilities extend across 19 EPA programs nationwide. It makes for a very full schedule, but Ahmed credited EPA leaders for pushing such an aggressive agenda.

"They know what they want and where they want to be," he said. "The buy-in they have been able to achieve from across the different regions helps us as a contractor to move forward."