The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced March 28, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person May 10.
Next is Corey Hulen, chief technology officer at Mattermost, and finalist in the Private and Public Chief Technology Officer category. Here, he shares key achievements, focus areas going forward, career advice and more.
What key achievements did you have in 2023?
In 2023, I stepped in to lead Mattermost’s Small Business Innovation Research program to drive innovation and support the creation of new mission-critical ChatOps capabilities for our secure collaboration platform. Over the course of the year, I worked with the team to develop and test capabilities for our four active contracts, one of which we officially completed this past March, delivering custom ChatOps capabilities including message priority, acknowledgement and persistent notifications. Additionally, we built several key partnerships across the public and private sector to support the development of custom features for real-time, mission-critical collaboration moving forward.
In addition to the successful development and launch of our new custom capabilities, our biggest accomplishment in the last year stems from the United States Air Force Air Mobility Command’s use of custom ChatOps capabilities as part of the Mobility Guardian 2023 exercise. AMC’s use of ChatOps to orchestrate operations across an Indo-Pacific exercise area of nearly 13 million square miles underscored the importance of the real-time, secure collaboration we strive to deliver.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the mission?
As technology continues to evolve and impact mission operations, our ongoing commitment to accelerating decision advantage, self-sovereign collaboration and out-of-band incident response stands to support the agility and resilience of the world’s most important organizations.
More specifically, we’re in constant pursuit of innovative ways to support our servicemen in overcoming challenges with rapid, secure communication. As such, Mattermost will continue to focus on delivering new, innovative capabilities to accelerate mission-critical work and will pursue new partnerships and research and development grants to execute on this plan moving forward.
What is your best career advice for those who want to follow in your footsteps?
My advice is to be passionate about technology and consider how you can apply it to solve real-world problems. A great way to do this is to start contributing to open-source software communities and projects to share your work, meet other like-minded people and expand your network.
Fun Fact: What is something about you that most people do not know?
Outside of my work with Mattermost, I love spending time outdoors hiking, backpacking and fishing. I especially enjoy Tenkara fishing, which is a form of fly fishing that comes from Japan, up in the mountains at remote alpine lakes and streams.