The Lab is in many ways similar to a small city, and people like Louella Panaga help keep it operational day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute.

Louella wears two hats at the Lab. She is the IT Service Management (ITSM) Team Lead within the Livermore Information Technology (LivIT) program. Her team streamlines and automates work processes for programs all across the Lab, like the workflow system that manages user requests and approvals at the National Ignition Facility. In fact, Louella’s team is responsible for a variety of service request and tracking workflows—anything from security inspections to employee ergonomic evaluations and the HPC center’s operational incidents. She states, “We’re eliminating paper forms and spreadsheets while expediting the routing of requests and support issues.”

Her ITSM team develops applications for the Lab’s ServiceNow platform, which includes workflows, notifications, user interface forms, data model structures, reporting features, dashboards, and integration capabilities. Their application software requires expertise in JavaScript and Angular JS.

Wearing her other hat as an Agile SCRUM Master, Louella keeps two major projects on task. The first is the Voice Modernization Project, which is upgrading the Lab’s voiceover IP systems and mobile device management. The other project involves fully aligning the ServiceNow data center infrastructure with IT services. She explains, “At the end of this project, we will see how a data center issue or outage can impact IT services. Being able to analyze the business impact will help the Lab’s IT staff plan better, communicate more accurately, and work proactively to reduce end-user impact.”

Louella also notes, “The fun part of my job is having the opportunity to learn and be exposed to new IT technologies, propose new ways of doing things, and work with open-minded and geeky professionals.”

She earned both a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.B.A. from De La Salle University in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Her extended family in the U.S. gets together every Thanksgiving to share good Filipino food and to play mahjong. These reunions are always full of laughter.

—Holly Auten