The CMS Innovation Center

Director of Digital Operations

The CMS Innovation Center was created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010. When I got there in 2011, I was employee number 50 or so. We were a startup within government.

My job was to oversee the digital operations which entailed, primarily, building out innovation.cms.gov.

When I arrived there was a website, but it was in flat files. We migrated to the content management system of 

I oversaw a team of designers, developers, and digital gurus. As the CMS Innovation Center itself grew -- multi-million dollar programmatic announcements occurred almost weekly -- so did the site. And keeping up with all of those announcements was HARD work. 

We leveraged a combination of Percussion CMS (which was the enterprise product we were forced into), Socrata Data Management, and custom builds. We had to live up to the idea of "innovation" while working within the confines of the government agency we were a part of.

We operated initially in isolation but eventually integrated into the larger operations of government. So, having worked myself out of a job, I left.