ST. LOUIS – Marvin “Ray” Baker was recently selected as the Technical/Information Technology category Individual winner of the Greater St. Louis Federal Executive Board’s 2020 Excellence in Government award.
Baker, an IT specialist in the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command’s communications directorate, was one of 82 individuals nominated for EIG awards in 14 different categories. He is the second Surface Warrior to be selected as a top federal employee in the St. Louis region in the past three years.
“Ray is out in front, making things happen. His team is leading the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army on the journey to the Cloud, realizing the vision of the U.S. Transportation Command Commander,” said Bryan King, the chief information officer for SDDC.
“He is people focused, and this accomplishment is a direct reflection of his efforts to build and lead a strong team,” he added.
According to his nomination packet, Baker’s leadership and technical skills were critical in the successful migration of SDDC applications to the Cloud. His ability to set the pace, design the end state, and collaborate across the staff was critical to this project’s success with an environment allowing for high availability, zero downtime with multiple zones to host the application, accelerated release cycles supporting an Agile and DevOps pipeline, and infrastructure savings based on paying for capacity as needed vice a static environment.
“The Cloud migration was a coordinated effort orchestrated by Ray's team, bringing together multiple programs and stakeholders inside and outside SDDC. This was accomplished while still maintaining the current environment for mission support, in addition to transitioning over 300,000 users to a new identity access management solution,” said King.
When asked about being selected for the award, Baker was humble and attributed it the team.
“I felt pride and humility when I was selected for the award. Not pride for me, but for the team members responsible. Being selected means to me that my team and I have a full understanding of the SDDC vision and its lines of effort. Being able to map the work back to the vision has always been important to me and to see the manifestation of this in this award means a lot to me,” he said.
The Greater St. Louis Federal Executive Board will present Baker his award at their 2021 Awards Ceremony, May 4.
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