Top 25 Cyber Execs to Watch in 2020

Randy James, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mission Services & Technology Solutions, ICF

Since 2017, Randy James has overseen Mission Services & Technology Solutions’ mission of providing transformative, integrated and adaptive risk management, IT and resiliency solutions for federal, state and commercial customers. This includes identifying, prioritizing and mitigating threats to missions across critical infrastructure, networks and systems.

In 2019, James recognizes the hiring of a mission-driven team focused on client execution as one of the year’s great achievements.

“It is with focused and dedicated leaders that an organization achieves results,” he said. “My solid team of leaders helped to drive results in client satisfaction and also a growth enabled organization.”

He also put a renewed focus on developing solutions for increasingly connected reality, which presents “massive challenges to military and commercial entities working to safeguard networks from diverse, emerging and growing threats to information and physical security,” James wrote in a 2019 commentary for Nextgov.

His team’s first approach was to look at each problem as a set of cyber challenges that included both physical aspects and virtual environments as a combined problem set. Then, the approach applied an agile, whole-of-nation approach to cyber and physical infrastructure resilience and called for increasing public-private sector collaboration to help solve the nation’s biggest challenges.

“I specifically focused how we view our current connected world and how that presents massive challenges to military and commercial entities working to safeguard networks from growing threats,” James said. “I view cyber as an enabler for resilience, one of many domains that affect the security of the entire enterprise.”

The team is specifically focused on providing holistic solutions designed to secure all systems — from IT, people and processes to physical infrastructure — where clients have access to a diverse set of capabilities designed to meet the full scale of diffuse and asymmetric cyber threats.

“Our approach is the view of the entire domain and not specifically by market,” James added. “We are capabilities focused and our consultant model is focused on the approach to solving the problem.”

Ultimately, the organization has a broad and deep set of capabilities that it applies to the domains.

“This enables us to not address just one challenge but allows us to take the integrated approach I described above,” James said.

Why Watch:

James renamed the division he leads the Mission Systems and Technology Solutions because he knows the organization is dealing with guaranteeing mission delivery, primarily focused on technology solutions to execute on that promise.

“Additionally, we will continue focus into the physical, cyber, IT domains within DOD and federal civilian markets where this holistic approach solves big problems,” James said.

This means showing a renewed attention on how to solve emerging threats — including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, information warfare against the election system and cyberattacks targeting both defense and civilian networks that put the nation’s military capability, critical infrastructure, democratic institutions and the safety of civilians at risk.