November 2009 - MSTI Receives Top 100 MBE Award

MSTI’s hard work and dedication was recognized as one of the winners of the Top 100 Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) Awards. The scope of the Top 100 MBE® Awards Ceremony includes women and minority owned businesses from the State of Maryland, Delaware, District of Columbia and Virginia with a reach of more than 400,000 women and minority business owners. With more than 1,400 nominations from businesses across the region, a panel of distinguished judges chose the winners based on demonstrated outstanding achievement in four key areas: entrepreneurship, client satisfaction, professionalism and community contributions.

October 2009 - Kathleen Tovsen & Jacquelyn Green-Woody – MSTI Employees of the 3rd Quarter

Ms. Tovsen and Ms. Jackie Green-Woody are senior budget/financial analysts supporting the Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E). In this capacity Ms. Tovsen is the program element monitor of Operational Test Activities and Analysis, with a budget of $122 million in FY 2009. She prepares, processes, and reconciles Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests (MIPR) and Program Budget Accounting System allocations and ensures adequate supporting documentation is on file. She monitors and tracks fund usage throughout the execution phase of the budget for specific organizational elements and monitors obligations and expenditures to ensure they are in compliance with OUSD (Comptroller) annual goals.

Ms. Green-Woody is responsible for submitting the daily “flat file” report to the Defense Finance Accounting Service (DFAS) which transmits the commitments and obligations that are reported by the OT&E field activities. She performs liaison function between the OT&E Business Financial Manager’s office and DFAS in such matters by gathering and interpreting pertinent data and deriving solutions to day-to-day finance and accounting matters in accordance with accounting principles, policies and objectives of the accounting system. She reviews monthly DFAS accounting reports and locates discrepancies, determines source of error and takes necessary corrective action.

During this past quarter both analysts working as a team have been instrumental in clearing out negative unliquidated obligation balances (NULOs), writing an office standard operating procedure on how to clear NULOs, and creating a log to track NULOs. A negative unliquidated obligation balance generally occurs in an account when valid disbursements are incorrectly matched with obligations and the disbursements exceed the obligations. Negative balances represent error conditions that must be researched and corrected as quickly as possible.

This past quarter these two analysts working with the DFAS representative were able to clear 9 NULOs. This is a detailed and time consuming process. Research and correction actions must begin as soon as it is apparent that a disbursement transaction has resulted in a NULO. Although the accounting office involved must immediately determine whether the disbursement is a valid charge to the fund holder, and whether a matching obligation transaction is recorded under a different or incorrect document number, this research was conducted by Ms. Green-Woody and Ms. Tovsen.

The efforts by Ms. Tovsen and Ms. Green-Woody went above and beyond. As a result of Ms. Green-Woody and Ms. Tovsen’s dedication and commitment to “delighting the customer” they were able to clear all exiting NULOs during this past quarter. Their professionalism, technical skills and mission focus have been instrumental to the success of the DOT&E team. Their dedication to excellence and their outstanding work ethic make them a valuable asset to MSTI and DOT&E.

Congratulations to Ms. Green-Woody and Ms. Tovsen as MSTI Employees of the Quarter.

September 2009 – MSTI Wins HR Solutions Contract with Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA)

The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) is a major DoD Field activity with worldwide scope and the critical mission of ensuring that high quality education programs, from preschool through grade 12, are provided for eligible dependents of DoD military service members and civilian employees stationed in 14 foreign countries overseas, certain areas of the US, and select US territories and possessions outside the 48 contiguous states. DoDEA is comprised of the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS), the overseas components, and the Department of Defense Domestic Elementary and Secondary Schools (DDESS), the “stateside” component. The DoDEA operates over 200 schools and employs approximately 17,000 professional educators and support staff serving over 106,000 students, DoDEA is one of the largest, most diverse, and geographically dispersed school jurisdictions, and its educational program consistently rates at or near the top of the comparison with other school systems.

MSTI provides administrative support services to Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) headquarters including file room administrative operations support services. This involves the maintenance of over 17,000 personnel folders including overseas allowance and performance documents. We also prepare documents for shipment to other HR offices or the National Personnel Records Center for archiving.

September 2009 – EPA Central Data Exchange Program (sub to CGI Federal)

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is charged with protecting human health and the environment. Since 1970, EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people. EPA works to develop and enforce regulations that implement environmental laws enacted by Congress. EPA is responsible for researching and setting national standards for a variety of environmental programs, and delegates to states and tribes the responsibility for issuing permits and for monitoring and enforcing compliance.

The Office of Environmental Information (OEI), headed by the Chief Information Officer, manages the life cycle of information to support our goal of protecting human health and the environment. The OEI Office of Information Collection (OIC) collects, manages, provides and safeguards environmental information.

As a result of increasing demand for electronic reporting and data exchange among trading partners and the regulated community, in 1999 EPA established the Central Data Exchange (CDX). CDX is the designated gateway where environmental data is received from the regulated community and processed for delivery to program offices in the Agency. CDX also serves as the point of presence on the Environment Information Exchange Network where currently State and Tribes routinely conduct data transactions with EPA.

MSTI provides support for the CDX Reporting Centers (RC)/Data Processing Centers (DPC) including data entry and records management support for the Toxic Relief Inventory (TRI) and Risk Management Program (RMP).

August 2009 - MSTI Annual Summer Picnic

MSTI held its annual summer picnic at Lake Accotink Park. There were approximately 85 people including current and former employees, guests, and customers that came out to enjoy the festivities and Famous Dave’s barbecue.

July 2009 - Jonathan Smith – MSTI Employee of the 2nd Quarter

Jonathan Smith was selected as “Employee of the Quarter” for the second quarter, 2009. Jon is a support engineer for the MSTI project at the Veterans Affairs facility in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was nominated by his program manager, Carolyn Booth.

Jon’s major job responsibility involves supporting the Enterprise Support Solution, which includes support of the national VistA applications, backbone (LAN/WAN), email, etc. This includes assisting in the development efforts, software testing, documenting, creating and modifying user accounts, starting/stopping services, supporting server hardware and deploying software.

Since Jon is great at programming, Ms. Booth says, he is often called upon to assist others in resolving problems. Recently, the VA Service Desk supervisory staff needed Apropos statistics for a report they needed quickly. The only option under the generic Apropos reports is an option to run this report on everyone who has an Apropos account, when all that was needed was information for one Analyst. This report would only allow one day at a time, and they needed a full FY’s worth of data. Each one of those reports takes about 3-5 minutes, so multiplied by 365 days, it would be very time consuming and they needed the information quickly.

When Jon learned of the need, he created a custom report that is extremely user friendly and versatile to get the information. The report he created took about 3 minutes to run and gave multiple output options to save it in.

This is not the first time Jon has voluntarily gone beyond his regular duties to assist others. Examples include adapting the Symon Board to Support Services’ needs when the vendor was unable to do so, resolution of problem on the PBX that caused 3-way calls to be sent to the 8-party bridge relative to the remote Hines office, and creating automated reports for upper management using a new tool (MS SQL Reporting Services). “Jon is an extremely talented individual and goes beyond his job description to help others,” Ms Booth concluded.

Congratulations to Jonathan Smith as MSTI Employees of the Quarter.

May 2009 - MSTI Employee Deployed to Iraq

Steve Bradford, System Administrator from the Ft. Detrick (MD) worksite, has been activated and deployed to Iraq, along with his unit from the DC National Guard. He left for his one-year deployment on May 1, 2009.

March 2009 – MSTI Support AE2S Vision: The Army Equipping Enterprise System (AE2S)

The US Army Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Programs, Force Development Directorate, currently manages the daily operations and future enhancement of the Army Flow Model (AFM), Continuous Early Validation (CEaVa) and Force Development Investment Information System (FDIIS) software applications. MSTI supports, as a subcontractor to SAIC, the Army Flow Model (AFM), a decision support system designed to provide the Army staff an integrated, quick turn-around planning tool to assess actual or notional force structures and/or policies across the Army’s functional areas (force structure, personnel, logistics, sustainment, training, infrastructure and budget). The AFM provides data for Army Forces Generation (ARFORGEN) and provides information concerning unit Modified Table of Organization and Equipment (MTOE) equipment and personnel authorizations and inventory of equipment in units.

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