Hector Alicea is the President and owner of HLA & Associates, LLC (HLA), an information technology (IT) consulting company. HLA specializes in using agile and lean methods to cut through the complexity of application development, integration, and infrastructure as code, helping agencies drive value early from their information, making it available, accessible, and consumable -- from anywhere, anytime -- in an interoperable and seamless environment.Mr. Alicea is a proven visionary and leader with both technology management and “hands-on” development skills. Mr. Alicea has a proven track record of leveraging agile and lean methods, to reduce development complexity, that enables delivering customer value early, which meets and exceeds customer and business requirements.

Mr. Alicea is was the Technical lead on the implementation of U.S. Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) new Identity Access Management Solution based on the Forgerock platform, deployed as microservices on a Kubernetes infrastructure, and is also the Technical lead for the implementation of HUD’s API Microservices infrastructure implementation based on Mulesoft, both operating in HUD’s Azure cloud. The API Microservices infrastructure became the primary integration hub between HUD’s On-premise legacy applications and HUD’s new modernized cloud-based and open source based applications.Mr. Alicea initially supported the HUD OCIO Chief Technology Office with various strategic initiatives. Specifically, 1.) Adopting open source technology, 2.) Moving to cloud technology using infrastructure as code 3.) Moving to Agile and DevOps development processes.

Mr Alicea, led a small team of highly skilled, “jack of all trades” technologist in support of the Emerging Technology Branch; to immediately research and develop any highly technical infrastructure or development effort so that product line development teams can stay focused on continuous daily release deliveries. The TDD AADS team allowed USCIS to take on projects which may incur risk, but isolate that risk, so that it would not impact customer delivery or release schedules. On the successes side of the risk, successful projects may end up accelerating USCIS delivery, when the proven technology and processes are mainstreamed into the USCIS Software Development stack or teams.Successful AADS projects includeKafka Deployment: The eventual replacement of TIBCO Messaging with KafkaCommon Microservices Initializer: A microservices bootstrap templated framework, that with the use of a wizard can generate a skeletal Spring Boot Java microservice, along with Dockerfile, Jenkinsfile, and Openshift deployment yaml, deployable to Openshift Container Platform (OCP).Kong Deployment: An API Gateway for ELIS microservices.ELIS Person Query Microservice: This microservice enabled pulling out a large chuck of code from the monolithic ELIS Application into a separate but integrated microservice running in OpenShift Kubernetes.

Mr. Alicea led the development of the SEVIS Information Sharing Infrastructure. Mr. Alicea was responsible for the build-out and deployment of the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), into the ICE Cloud, to support the information sharing requirements for the SEVIS modernization program. Tasks include building the "infrastructure as code", using AWS Cloud Formation, and DevOps processes using Jenkins to fully automate the deployment of the ESB infrastructure, and its Info Sharing APIs. Technologies used include: Tomcat, Java, Mule ESB, ForgeRock OpenAM, RabbitMQ, AWS Cloud Formation, and MongoDB. APIs deployed include those interfacing with DOS-CCD, FBI, USCIS, and IDENT.

During the Federal Government Shutdown, Mr. Alicea supported and led a short-term commercial project to port a content management system (CMS) software package from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The solution involved porting the CMS Helm deployment package and writing infrastructure as code to instantiate the solution in an Azure subscription.

Mr. Alicea supported DHS/USCIS Office of Information Technology (OIT), Risk and Fraud Systems (RFS) Group as a Technical Lead on the ESB-Risk Fraud Support Services (RFSS) from conception to operational deployment. The primary objective of RFSS was to execute Risk Fraud rules (using Complex Event Processing), which enabled strengthening National Security safeguards and enabling USCIS to combat fraud. The solution was highly successful, identified national security threats within 24 hours of initial production operation, and continues being enhanced today.

Mr. Alicea supported DHS/USCIS Office of Information Technology (OIT) by providing strategic advisory services, project management, architectural oversight, and development services with the OIT implementation of SOA and the ESB at USCIS. Under Mr. Alicea’s guidance, USCIS has deployed onto the USCIS ESB fifteen (15) production “Services” over 100 major, minor, and critical releases. These services support various USCIS business missions spanning benefit adjudication, alien verification, biometric data processing, electronic document management, application intake, and background vetting. Mr. Alicea has been directly involved with the planning, design, development, and deployment into production of 140 system interfaces across 58 systems which span DHS, Department of State, State Motor Vehicle Administrations, as well as one of the Big Four banks of the United States. Mr. Alicea mastered many disciplines necessary to take this program from a CIO concept into a fully functional successful program continually delivering customer value. During the last 9 years at USCIS, Mr. Alicea, played many roles required to make the USCIS ESB program a success, such as contractor program lead, Enterprise Architect, Information Systems Security Officer, Privacy Analyst, business analyst, Scrum Master, network engineer, data center engineer and developer. The industry has acknowledged these achievements with industry awards that the USCIS OIT ESB Program has received. The NIEM Program Management Office (PMO) awarded a "Best of NIEM"​ Award to the USCIS ESB Program at the 2009 NIEM National Training Event. The Government Information Technology Executive Council (GITEC) awarded a "Project Management Excellence" Award, in the SOA category, to the USCIS ESB Program at the 2008 IPIC conference. In 2008, the DHS CIO Enterprise Data Management Office awarded USCIS the NIEM Blue Ribbon Award for its pervasive use of NIEM within the ESB Program.

Under contract by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) component, U.S. Citizenship Immigration Services (USCIS) providing Program Management Support Services to USCIS Office of Transformation Coordination (OTC) specifically providing advisory services within the Business Integration domain associated with the agency’s 5-year business transformation effort.

On behalf of DHS/USCIS, supported Attorneys and staff within the Office of the General Counsel Department of Homeland Security, providing expert consulting and witness services in software leasing and licensing matters in the United States Civilian Board of Contract Appeals Case CBCA 1012. DHS won the case which saved the agency $15M in software leasing fees.

Solutions consulting services to clients starting their ESB/SOA initiatives. Led development of prototypes, proof of concepts, and pilots. Clients include:NIH and Dept.of Commerce: Assisted with the TIBCO solution to support integration of their respective internal procurement systems.An Intel Agency: Assisted an SI with the TIBCO solution to automate and manage the collection of electronic assets from seized computers. TSA: Assisted an SI with integrating Siebel, Oracle HR, and a DOT mainframe in 8 weeks to support the mission of hiring the 60,000 baggage screeners in 2002.Also at TSA: Assisted with the development of a Business Activity Monitoring prototype to monitor and provide real-time visibility of incidents within TSA.US-Census: Assisted the winning SI with the TIBCO solution to support the 2010 Decennial program.Department of Energy, WAPA, SNR: Assisted with the TIBCO solution to support their business transformation surrounding power procurement.

Team founder and technical lead for ChannelPoints Commerce Intelligence Service (CIS). This system was a Business Intelligence application using advanced data warehouse technologies. It provided complimentary decision support for the ChannelPoint Exchange Platform. The platform was provided via an Application Service Provider (ASP) delivery model to Insurance Brokers and Insurance Carriers. Strategic Development partners included Zurich Financial Services, GE Financial Assurance, and United Health Care.

Assessed and prototyped various OLAP and Data Warehouse technologies that led to the development of a new line of packaged analytical applications called Manugistics NetWORKS ONEview. Technical representative for the Microsoft alliance. Led many of the Manugistics' Microsoft initiatives, which included development of new product concepts and extensions to the Manugistics suite, which exploited Microsoft technology and supported Microsoft’s Digital Nervous System marketing initiative.Participated, as a core team member for several Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activities providing technical due diligence analysis.Led a team in the development and release of the Manugistics Integrator for SAP R/3 ERP System, a highly configurable event-based message oriented middleware (MOM) that allows for seamless integration between Manugistics Supply Chain Application Suite and SAP's R/3 Release 3.0d.

Staff development, supporting business development, and ensuring client satisfaction for Farradyne deployed systems.Farradyne Task Director and System Architect for a multi-company team to build the Atlanta Regional Advanced Transportation Management System (ATMS) to support the transportation requirements for the 1996 Olympic Games.Original System Architect, Designer, and Chief Programmer for Farradyne Systems' flagship product, Management Information System for Traffic (MIST), a multi-tier distributed application used to monitor and control a city's traffic signal controllers real time. Oversaw MIST implementations in the cities of Nashua NH, Huntington WV, LaMesa CA, and Atlanta GA.Chief Programmer and System Engineer for the development and delivery of the Urban Traffic Control System (UTCS) deployed in Washington D.C. The UTCS monitors and controls over 1400 traffic signal controllers in the District in real-time.