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As a Human Resource Business Partner at NASA Headquarters, Selina Salgado describes her job as helping with \u201call things people\u201d for the enterprise. By facilitating technological solutions to human resources (HR) challenges and needs, she excels at an often-underestimated aspect of Digital Transformation (DT): the interpersonal side. As a champion of community building, knowledge sharing, and digital upskilling, Selina was an easy selection for this month\u2019s Digital Transformer award.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Selina started at NASA in 2019 as a\u00a0Pathways\u00a0intern and previously worked as a mentoring coordinator for Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), which is where her Digital Transformation journey began. At MSFC, she created an all-in-one, automated system for open job postings, which decreased the agency\u2019s time to hire and increased visibility for available positions. She has aspirations for further leveraging these types of systems to improve inclusive teaming across NASA by making HR tools available and interoperable across centers. Her current team under the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer (OCHCO) operates with an 80-20 mentality, working to create common tools and solutions that are 80% interoperable and 20% customizable to the specific organization or scenario.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
In addition to her technical work on digital HR tools like the automated job board, Selina takes initiative to help people understand what transformation means to them and how to practice transformation in their daily lives. In collaboration with Jess Deibert, DT Digital Academy Lead, Selina created the new Transformation Tips (TxTips) series, which features NASA employees\u2019 tech-related tips for doing their work. The instant popularity of the community-led series led to speaker requests for TxTip presentations from several other offices at NASA, including the Office of STEM Engagement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most recently, Selina has become a key contributor and partner in NASA\u2019s Summer of AI upskilling campaign to help employees maximize the benefits of AI while managing risks. As a self-taught developer, Selina has created several tools and apps to streamline agency-wide collaboration and data collection. She leveraged PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power BI, integrated with SharePoint, to feed data to a dashboard used by the Agency Chief AI Officer to brief the Administrator on impact metrics from the Summer of AI campaign. Selina also developed and executed several events to engage and excite the workforce around this campaign, including conceiving the agency\u2019s first \u201cBattle of the Bots\u201d event. Her Reddit-style \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d event helped employees understand the differences in large language models by pitting ChatGPT against Microsoft CoPilot to respond to participant-submitted prompts and questions. The Battle of the Bots saw the highest engagement of any asynchronous Summer of AI event. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Selina\u2019s educational background aligns with her focus on the connective and collaborative aspects of Digital Transformation. She received her bachelor\u2019s degree in business management with a focus in human resource management and her master\u2019s degree in education and student affairs, which led to her interest in NASA\u2019s internship and mentorship programs. The connection piece, she says, is what she enjoys most about collaborating with DT. \u201cIf you run into an issue, there\u2019s a community of practice out there for you to reach out to and engage with\u2026to build that network with other employees that are interested in and passionate about transformation.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
The other influence Selina points to along her Digital Transformation journey is her military background. \u201cI grew up in a military household, and then I joined the Navy right out of high school. There\u2019s a culture there of how to get things done,\u201d says Selina. \u201cWhat drives my passion for processes and systems is that it\u2019s transferrable to somebody else\u2026I need to be able to pass that on to the next person.\u201d She gets energized by learning new tools and finding solutions to roadblocks, especially when she can establish procedures for others to leverage and build on her work. \u201cThat\u2019s something that I love about transformation and just change in general\u2014that you get to develop and learn and connect with new people.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one message Selina hopes to spread at NASA through her achievements as a Digital Transformer, it\u2019s that Digital Transformation is for everyone. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be in IT, you don\u2019t have to have that background or technical [ability],\u201d she says. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m in HR. Any field at NASA can utilize the digital landscape and digital transformation. Those principles and resources are available for everybody.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n