Rising Star Beth Sherry Maloney
Maloney served as social-media evangelist and educator, both within Palladian and in the federal IT community at large. She also managed the transition of the Treasury Department’s HSPD-12 initiative to the General Services Administration’s USAccess shared-services program.
Age: 35
Organization: Palladian Partners
Title: Managing director
Nominated for: Serving as social-media evangelist and educator, both at Palladian and in the federal IT community at large. Initiated a Lunch and Learn series to keep Palladian staff informed of tools and trends, such as wikis, mind maps and Twitter. Worked through the Bethesda Young AFCEANs to launch the Federal Web 2.0 Virtual Podium Series, featuring social-networking experts from across government.
First IT mentor: Michele Friedman, my first manager at Andersen Consulting, provided clients excellent service, which required good organization skills, very analytical thinking, and always thinking everything through then following through. Her approach to solution development combined technical know-how with enough creativity to satisfy the marketing and communications folks.
Latest accomplishment: Getting many self-proclaimed “non-techies” to start asking for social-media support and technology assistance when they wouldn’t have imagined asking for it even six months ago.
Career highlight: Sticking with technology after my first three weeks on the job was spent learning to program in C. With a degree in international business and marketing I thought, “What am I doing here???” Lucky for me, I gained an appreciation for the technical details but moved into a more fitting place, which started as requirements development and morphed into sky's-the-limit Internet solutions by the late '90s.
Favorite bookmark: The under-construction (for over a year) redesign of PalladianPartners.com — the cobbler’s kids have no shoes!
Dream non-IT-related job: Running a bakery/coffee shop featuring all kinds of creative confections and pairings.
The annual Rising Star awards are presented by the 1105 Government Information Group, publisher of Federal Computer Week, GCN and Washington Technology, to public and private sector employees in the federal IT community who have gone above and beyond their job descriptions to make a lasting impact in their organization. See all the 2009 Rising Star award winners.