Bob Walker Honored as Employee of the Year

The Office of Legacy Management (LM) has honored IT Specialist Bob Walker as a co-winner of this year’s Philip C. Leahy Employee of the Year award for his long-tenured hard work and dedication as an integral part of LM’s cybersecurity program.

The Leahy award was created in 2017 and recognizes LM employees who demonstrate qualities of an outstanding team player. Leahy established what is now LM’s Grand Junction office, and later served under the Atomic Energy Commission. Leahy personified qualities of a team player as defined by “The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player” by John C. Maxwell, including: dependable, enthusiastic, prepared, tenacious, and self-improving.

“I had a couple of emotions. First, I’m very proud of this distinction. Those of us in IT are usually only recognized on the few days when things are not working as planned.  We are often overlooked on most days when things are working,” Walker said.  “The IT team has many areas in which we can improve, and we continue to strive to make those improvements.  However, I don’t forget how hard we work to go unnoticed.  So, it is satisfying to be acknowledged for the many good days, as opposed to the few bad.”

Walker also expressed how humbled he was to achieve such an award. “It’s definitely an honor. There are a lot of incredibly talented, hard-working individuals within LM, much like the co-award winner, Bill Frazier.”

Walker grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he attended West Virginia University. During his undergraduate studies, Walker began writing code part-time for a contractor supporting the Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, his part-time job quickly turned full time.

“I became interested in computer science before it exploded into what it is today. At the time, only a few people had personal computers in their home, and the internet was a bulletin board, accessible by a very slow telephone modem,” Walker said. “I was attracted to technology because I appreciated the efficiency that computers could achieve to perform tasks.”

After three years, Walker moved to Naval Air Systems Command in Crystal City, Virginia, to broaden his experience in Help Desk management and other related issues before moving to work under the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2002, he found his way to IBM to support National Defense University in Washington, D.C. During his time there, Walker worked in network administration, enterprise architecture, and information assurance.

In 2005, Walker landed at the LM office in Morgantown. He was the first federal LM hire from outside the original team. 

Since moving to LM, Walker has been responsible for all areas of IT, in both primary and backup roles. He has also been deeply involved in developing a procedure for managing IT projects in the organization to include a federal sponsor. Walker has been instrumental in establishing many of the budgeting and capital planning activities performed by the Archives and Information Management (AIM) team.

“I have been the acting AIM team leader for six months and have a better appreciation for how good of a leader Doc Parks is. He makes it looks easy, but he leads by example and actively helps everyone around him improve their skills,” Walker said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do with the new hires. I spend a lot of time disseminating a lot of my corporate knowledge to the newer AIM team staff members, so they can maximize their technical skills to support LM.”

However, Walker never backs down from a challenge, and working in IT does have a list of challenges from time to time. One of his biggest challenges is trying to differentiate enterprise level products from those in the everyday home.

“There are many niche apps and IOT (Internet of Things) products that can accomplish specific tasks, incredibly easily,” Walker said. “However, those companies often focus very little on security, nor do they have any sort of capability to be ‘managed’ centrally.  It is often a tremendous amount of effort to reverse engineer those items, or to try and determine what needs secured, and if we can do so at scale efficiently.”

Fellow IT Specialist Kyle Brown said Walker handles these challenges and more with ease, which is one of the reasons he nominated Walker for the award.

“Bob is someone very deserving of his nomination for employee of the year for many reasons. To sum it up, he is someone who has taken on many challenges and held himself accountable for anything that he does,” Brown said.

“A major challenge that Bob has succeeded in that I admire the most is his ability to take on an even bigger challenge in being a team lead. He has a great vision for the LM mission and has been very influential, encouraging, and supportive to his team members, and those are some attributes I see that make him a great leader,” Brown added.

While Walker certainly keeps busy on the job, he is proud to be working with such a great team and enjoys working for LM.

“The reason I like working for LM is the clarity and alignment of the LM mission to the goals.  This flows down to the teams and the individuals.  I have always felt that LM lays out clear objectives and then provides the employees the tools and training to work toward those goals,” Walker said.

Despite his many accomplishments and hard work within LM, Walker is most proud of one achievement — his daughter Jessica.

“Being a parent is what I am most proud of. My daughter Jessica is a junior at WVU. I like to think I had something to do with it, but she and her mom probably have more to do with it than I ever did,” he said.

As for his goals and future in LM, Walker looks forward to continuing his work within IT.

“I’m still excited every day to find ways to effectively improve the security and the productivity of LM Information Technology systems used by LM and LMS staff to accomplish the LM mission,” he said.