You’ve seen them quite often around the Pathfinder-verse, heard them speak at events or virtual meetings, maybe even dialogued with them in a forum thread—they’re our Most Valuable Pathfinders! They are the spark keeping the Pathfinder Community ablaze, so it was about time we took a beat to really get to know each one of our MVPs better and share their unique stories with you!

So without further ado, let’s get to know…
 

                                         Kyle Smith

The Basics

• Years of Automation Experience: 6 years
• Current Company: Humana Insurance
• Official Title: Associate Director, Business Intelligence

But this is how Kyle would actually describe what he does: I articulate business solutions for people who don’t have an extensive technical background or understanding of how to transition to modern concepts of data integrity and solutions.

• Biggest Professional Achievement to date: Working with his team to create the flagship Citizen Development program and first citizen developer team within Humana.

Five Fun Facts

• His birthday is May 5
• He says nothing beats the TV show Futurama
• If he could have any super power it would be super speed!
• He base jumped in Jakarta, Indonesia at the age of 14
• The next place he’d like to travel is Russia or Scotland - he’s fascinated by cities with unique architecture!

Expertise / Specializations

Kyle is an expert in project management and production oversight. His specialties are developing backlogs, justifying use cases, working through security asks and risks, and keeping compliance. Kyle is also a relatively strong developer. But if he could upskill in one area, he’d like to further improve his development skills, specifically in API and cloud-based solutions. He hopes he and his team can start leveraging more and more document automation and API use cases.

If he had one piece of advice for someone new to automation it would be:

“Understanding and conceptualizing a use case is the best way to translate what can be automated versus what should be automated. It’s important to clearly grasp what you stand to gain by automating, because not everything needs to be automated.”

Kyle in the Community

When it comes to connecting with his professional community, you won’t find Kyle on social media much these days. Rather, he prefers participating in network resource groups and outreach groups such as CodeNow. Specifically, he likes to spend his time with mentor programs that teach data-centric solutions and target marginalized communities so he can help ensure those up-and-coming youths have representation in these niche hiring fields.
 

What’s Next for Kyle

Kyle and his team of business intelligence associates are heavily focused on scaling cloud ETL and modernization across their integrated reporting utilizing Microsoft’s power platform and scrum mentality and agility, as well as packaging these concepts in an API build.

Thank you, Kyle, for letting us all get to know you better. And thank you for your continued contributions to our Pathfinder Community!