The finalists for WashingtonExec’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards were announced Sept. 25, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person Nov. 16.
Next is Lilian Herrera, mobile cybersecurity shared services manager with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. She is part of the Mobile App Vetting team with CISA, a Government TEAM Project of the Year finalist. Here, Herrera shares recent key achievements and learning from failures.
What key achievements did you have in 2023?
The past 12 months have been extremely busy for the Mobile App Vetting team and full of achievements that have allowed us to successfully position MAV as the go-to app vetting solution for Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies.
Our first key win in 2023 was achieving MAV’s Authority to Operate, or ATO, on CISA’s cloud enterprise system. This ATO tells the 102 FCEB agencies that are currently our customers, and all future customers, that MAV is a viable, long-term solution to their app vetting and mobile enterprise security needs.
Our team’s second major achievement in 2023 was in successfully onboarding 31 FCEB agencies and their child agencies to the service. Our team worked hard to demonstrate the valuable mobile security benefits MAV provides, and these agencies really responded.
As an aside, this maxed out our available FCEB agency licenses. The MAV team is in the enviable position of needing to increase its licenses to meet the demands of a growing customer base. Our team is working diligently to achieve this early in the new fiscal year.
What’s one key thing you learned from a failure you had?
I have learned that failure does not have to be a negative. Everyone fails — whether in their career or personal life — so we shouldn’t be ashamed of failing and run from disappointing outcomes. Failures serve as opportunities to make changes.
I always conduct a postmortem to examine the situation and the decisions made to identify what I could have done differently. When we learn from situations, our decisions and the outcomes, we are armed with this new knowledge to affect outcomes in the future. This self-examination then positions us for ultimate, long-term success as our career progresses and takes us to higher levels of responsibility and decision-making within our organization.