Wayne Lucernoni has worked in the information technology services industry for sixteen years. Currently Vice President and General Manager of Intel and Civil Programs at the Harris Corporation, Lucernoni talked with WashingtonExec about mobility and mobile security. In addition, Lucernoni offers his ideas about big data and his long time love of motorcycles.
WashingtonExec: Can you tell us a little about your background and your role at the Harris Corporation?
Wayne Lucernoni: I was born and raised locally. I currently run the intelligence, civil and healthcare IT business for Harris IT Services. In fact, I’ve been with Harris for twenty-one years both at our headquarters in Melbourne, Florida, and in Northern Virginia. Sixteen of those years have been in the IT services industry. What initially attracted me to Harris in the late 80’s, was when they moved their services business that was only two years old from Florida to the DC area. Career-wise, it was a good opportunity for me to join a small element of a large business that was very strong, agile and technology focused.
WashingtonExec: Could you tell us a little bit about your thoughts on mobility or how you are using mobility at Harris Corporation?
Wayne Lucernoni: On the macro level of mobility, the explosion of mobile devices has created a whole set of new challenges. It has put a lot of pressure on management; whether it is management of devices, applications, infrastructure, administration & support, security, or policy management. The diversity of mobile devices and their different use cases pose significantly different challenges than we have normally faced in IT infrastructure/enterprise management. A lot of IT organizations are playing catch up and some feel they are unprepared to tame this mobility tiger. Where we are focused at Harris is in creating an integrated solution across the IT spectrum that provides a one pane of glass management solution covering desktops, networks, servers, storage and the wide variety of mobile devices. The explosive growth and adoption of mobile devices and applications has moved the bottle neck that we see in the enterprise to the wireless infrastructure and bandwidth utilization. Just a couple of short years ago the standard industry-recognized consultants were recommending that businesses plan for a single device per user. Today, Cisco is saying that it is really three devices; users have a desktop, smart phone and a tablet. Our own internal analysis says 2.7, so we think the current estimates are pretty close as we see them independently. Each individual user today puts a lot heavier demand on the wireless infrastructure than just two or three years ago.
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“That is absolutely the hardest challenge – to try to duplicate that kind of commercial at-home experience within a standardized, controlled and secure corporate or government environment.”
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WashingtonExec: What is the greatest difficulty you’ve had in trying to keep mobile devices secure as a federal contractor?
Wayne Lucernoni: I think the biggest challenge that we’ve seen is the rising generation of leaders at Harris—and pretty much across our customers and partners—want their work environment or their mission environment to be just like their home environment. That explosion of ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) with real time access, fairly unlimited bandwidth and no application constraints is keeping CIOs awake at night. That is absolutely the hardest challenge – to try to duplicate that kind of commercial at-home experience within a standardized, controlled and secure corporate or government environment. More than a third of Harris’ 17,000-strong global workforce now connects to the Harris network via BYOD. We adopt a holistic approach to enterprise mobility management—one that extends far beyond mobile device management to encompass mobile infrastructure management, enterprise mobility strategy and enterprise mobility governance.
WashingtonExec: How do you think mobility is helping save the government money? Is mobility making us more efficient?
Wayne Lucernoni: Harris’ telecommunications cost is decreasing via streamlined acquisitions, leveraged pooling, negotiated volume pricing, and discount programs for BYOD. If you develop these models—this one pane of glass kind of solution that I talked about earlier where you have the bandwidth, security and governance in place to manage multi-platform devices—you will save a lot of money. The downside of mobile devices as we’ve known for many years is we are “always on”, but that’s a productivity increase from a management perspective either at the corporate or government level.
WashingtonExec: So it is a long term investment?
Wayne Lucernoni: Absolutely.
Washington Exec: How is BYOD/implementation of mobile devices onto the enterprise changing security standards in the federal government and for contractors?
Wayne Lucernoni: The mobility trend is largely influenced by the consumerization of IT, and the increasing trend toward multiple devices. This represents a paradigm shift away from traditional IT Enterprise thinking of a single hardware and software vendor, and corporations and the government will need to adjust to this. With employees bringing their own devices to work, and using them for work, the risk of data leak has increased significantly and requires new or updated policies, governance processes, tools and user education to ensure that data leakage is minimized or eliminated. This will facilitate a move toward contextual security, where network and data access is granted based on who you are, where you are, what you are using, and the understanding that the enterprise has the right to limit, monitor, manage, and secure/control your device while on their network topology.
WashingtonExec: What are the top three areas of interest or goals you have for mobility in the U.S. government?
Wayne Lucernoni: The move to mobility is being undertaken with the objectives to enhance decision making, increase productivity, to make better use of existing data, and to extend the network edge to remote and tactical users. Timely adoption and implementation of a sound Mobility business model will also allow the government to better attract and retain talent. In the DoD space, expanding mobile capabilities are significantly changing how the warfighter engages. Ultimately, the government faces challenges very similar to Harris, related to governance, policy, risk and device management, data security, and how to fund needed wireless network investments in a tight fiscal environment.
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“Our customers are struggling to confront that big data challenge today as well as planning for what will be almost exponential increases that come from the next generation of sensors and smart mobile devices that are currently in development. I think we are really just at the tip of the iceberg for Big Data and the challenges today are just a test run for what’s coming down the road.”
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WashingtonExec: Big data has been around for awhile, why do you think we’ve seen a government mandate by the Federal CTO and Federal CIO? Why do you think it is exploding now?
Wayne Lucernoni: I think the explosive growth and adoption of mobile devices plays a role in the big data coming of age. Certainly it’s a popular buzz word right now so it’s clear we’ve reached the tipping point where technology, access and the move of big data to the tactical edge or the user edge is driving huge increases in demand and expectations across all user groups. At the same time, the technology capacity and capabilities to increase the amount and number of source data into the system has significantly improved. Our customers are struggling to confront that big data challenge today as well as planning for what will be almost exponential increases that come from the next generation of sensors and smart mobile devices that are currently in development. I think we are really just at the tip of the iceberg for big data and the challenges today are just a test run for what’s coming down the road. The question is how do we help our customers manage and prepare for this? The Intelligence Community is, many times, the topic of debate on big data as it’s their needs and the fact that they have to have the ability to make timely or real-time decisions based on data mash-ups from different sources, in different forms, and the need to tag and store this mountain of data. Current efforts are focused on storage and virtualization access, and yet we see the biggest change is the increased focus on analytics and automation to deal with the greater amounts and types of source data, as well as faster decision cycles. And we can already tell that will accelerate much more rapidly in the next five years. The speed of the information cycle that we are in right now gives the Intelligence Community very little time to understand and make decisions, and as a result, they have a lot less room for reflection. Conversely one of the advantages of big data is that the community has increased options to validate the information. While there is not much time to reflect, they can actually confirm their data much more quickly with the right tools.
WashingtonExec: Does Harris Corporation see biometrics as a rising trend over the next five years?
Wayne Lucernoni: Biometrics frankly is a great opportunity for increased security. Harris has been involved with biometrics for several decades, typically as an integrator.
WashingtonExec: What is something most people might not know about you?
Wayne Lucernoni: I’ve enjoyed motorcycling since obtaining my license back in 1991 and while sport bikes and speed are a big thrill, I currently spend more time taking longer rides on my Victory Vision. It’s a big touring bike. Most of my rides are regional with my wife. She’s got five brothers and other family members have bikes so we spend a lot of time riding as a group. I’ve also taken numerous trips to Florida on it.
WashingtonExec: That’s a long trip.
Wayne Lucernoni: It’s a pleasure to ride.
WashingtonExec: What was your first job?
Wayne Lucernoni: My first job was working on a farm in Jefferson, Maryland – it’s outside of Frederick. It is a fairly rural, dairy farm community and that’s where I grew up. My first real job was with a mid-sized antennae manufacturer based in Sterling, Virginia – Radiation Systems. I was a staff and cost accountant there.
