spark360 Behind The Scenes: ATS Technical

Where to start with ATS Technical? Preparing this particular spark360 profile proved to be an eye-opener in several respects, beginning with the great personal back story for the company’s president and CEO, Lisa Murdock

Lisa was all over the entrepreneurial playback in 4th grade, with paper routes, Girl Scout cookie sales, cleaning houses and lawn mowing. Granted, that’s no different from a lot of other young people looking to make extra money for movies, sodas, etc. Heck, even I did the lawn mowing thing in junior high (although I must admit the frequency of my cold-calls on neighbors went down as the West Texas summer temperatures shot up). But clearly that youthful ambition and drive never left Lisa and propelled her to her current status as top executive for her own information technology outsourcing business. That’s not including a brief stop as a lawyer for a Fortune 500 beverage company, where she noticed the need for a small business that could not only write custom software for clients, but also because of SBA 8(a) certified company designations targeting minority/woman-owned businesses could help customers diversify their lists of outside contractors. She saw a niche and dropped out of an existing job to fill it, finding success in the end; the classic Entrepreneur 101 story.

But putting this spark360 profile together also involved talking with ATS customer Clarence Pape, who has worked with Lisa’s company on various government-based projects. During our interview, another revelation hit me: the use of social media and other Web 2.0 technologies to assist with disaster recovery efforts following the Haiti earthquake and the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Pape told me how ATS was assisting government agencies with setting up wikis, blogs, collaborative tools like Microsoft SharePoint, online chats and other new media enhancements to help with gathering information from the two disaster scenes. It certainly speaks well of ATS that it can deliver some of these social media skills that are all the rage among businesses as well as what might be called “traditional” IT resources (application development, enterprise database building, etc., working with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP products). To me, the big news was that the government was embracing those tools to get the conversation started among those who had been impacted by the earth moving in Haiti and the ecological disaster in the Gulf. Social media/Web 2.0 has the ability to enable real-time results when it comes to finding out exactly what people need and how it can be delivered to them. It can be the most cost-efficient and effective communication toolbox out there for those wanting to hear directly from those affected by a disaster, whether natural or man-made.

Lisa’s story, and the continued growth of social media tools: chalk it all up to the “learning something new every day” phenomenon – or rather, learning something with each spark360 segment for yours truly.

- Renay San Miguel