IT/Web services.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Meet the Staff - Financial executives international - Information technology

FEI's principal points of contact with members and the source of information about them, apart from mail and the telephone, are through the Web and a computerized database. It's critical function that is manned--actually, all of the personnel are men--by six people, three in information technology and three in Internet services.

Lionel Eppes, the Director of IT & Web Technology, is quite new to FEI--he started last October--but has more than 25 years' experience in various facets of IT development, programming and project management, much of that time working for banks or insurance companies; he also spent a half-dozen years as a technology consultant. Most recently, he worked at Harleysville Insurance Co. in Pennsylvania, where he worked closely with programmers and project managers.

Eppes confesses that he's never worked in an organization as small as FEI's administrative staff. "It's amazing to me how much does get done [here]," he says, "although it's tough. There are a lot of things on the table--a lot of ideas that the departments have, what they envision IT can do to make their areas even more efficient, and to produce products or services that are going to be more beneficial to the members."

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How does the department prioritize these projects? Eppes chuckles and says, "Right now, it's on a first-come, first-served basis. The ones that get higher priority are the ones that are of benefit to members or those that might be attractive to nonmembers."

Working with Eppes in the IT group are Christian Toledo, System Administrator, and Max Zhang, Senior Programmer. Toledo, who came to FEI in February 2002, has primary responsibility for ensuring that FEI's system of servers and software is running effectively and securely; that includes maintaining the system's firewall and an ever-evolving set of filters to cut down on email spam.

Zhang is the office's wizard on the central database, and is the person responsible for establishing protocols and running periodic or ad hoc reports on virtually anything needed by departments such as Accounting and Membership. An FEI employee since November 2000, Zhang, a relatively recent immigrant from China, has gone back there a couple of times to visit family and friends.

The Web group is headed by Stuart Williams, who joined FEI in July 1999 and is Manager of Internet Services. Williams has been intimately involved in all of the various enhancements and new products launched on the...