The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Pinnacle Awards were announced Oct. 8, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually Nov. 12.
Next up is Cloud Industry Executive of the Year finalist Aaron Jackson, who’s digital platforms lead at Accenture Federal Services. Here, he talks key professional achievements, career inflection points and what’s made him succeed.
What key achievements did you have in 2019/2020?
My 2019 and 2020 plans were focused on rising to the massive growth of platforms implementations in federal, while also keeping an eye on investments that had to be made if we wanted to stay best in industry. As COVID materialized, we were faced with maintaining this approach, while adapting to new delivery and investment needs. Managing through crisis has been a period of huge growth for me, personally and professionally.
I knew we had to coordinate on the right investments and stay laser focused on what our government clients would need to take advantage of the advancements going on in this space. To that end, we invested heavily on training and equipping our practitioners on the new skills needed to succeed in this market.
We also established a delivery best practices team to drive consistency at scale and invested heavily in innovation programs, including the Platform Elevation Lab — a prototyping team dedicated to bringing innovative digital platform experiences to federal clients through boundary-pushing proof of concepts and accelerators.
By the end of fiscal year 2020, we grew our digital platforms practice 86% over the previous year, and we continued to be the integrator of choice for our alliance partners and our government clients and were recognized as the top partner and integrator for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft and Pega.
What has made you successful in your current role?
There are multiple things, but I think the single biggest factor has been my ability to bring the best of Accenture to our government clients. Nobody has delivered more cloud and digital platform solutions globally than we have, and the opportunity is to tailor the best of what’s tried and tested in that success to our clients.
To do that, we’ve taken the proven techniques and methodologies and re-imagined how to do it here. We created a lower cost on-shore Digital Delivery Center in San Antonio, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri, where we have top-tier talent delivering predictable, secure, U.S.-based delivery that can adapt and scale as the mission and times demand. And we improved on their broad and complex organizational structure to run all of our digital platform capabilities as a single horizontal function under my leadership.
This difference has allowed us to ensure we’re bringing together the diversity of our digital expertise and learnings to provide a single trusted voice for our clients. And honing that complex, ever-evolving strategy for government, gives us unmatched credibility and keeps our clients on the forefront of innovation at their respective agencies.
What was a turning point or inflection point in your career?
I have more than two decades of experience providing consulting services and delivering technical solutions in support of government agencies. The big inflection point for me came with the realization of the benefits we can provide with cloud and digital platforms like Salesforce. I was part of the first-ever implementation of Salesforce in the secure GovCloud environment in 2013. I saw firsthand the benefits we could achieve by providing best practice commercial grade multitenant cloud solutions in a secure environment for government. And I was hooked.
Since that time, I’ve focused solely on digital platforms and after taking that first government agency from initial deployment to what is now one of the largest implementations of the Salesforce platform in the world. I now get to provide those kinds of opportunities for agencies all across our federal business and help direct our solutions and delivery for all cloud-based digital platform solutions.
This role has truly been a gift for me professionally and has provided me with the opportunity to do what I love to do.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
There is so much more to do in federal. The digital platforms revolution has really just begun. The early adopter agencies are seeing the fruits of their labors. Small programs produced small successes. Now, enterprise programs are changing whole mission areas.
My focus going forward is to bring this platforms revolution to all corners of the federal government. Small agencies, large agencies, civilian, defense. They all desire better solutions for their end users, radically cheaper O&M costs and more secure tech environments.
For so many years, we had a fairly small toolbox to accomplish these massive goals. Now, it seems like every week, there are new tools in the toolbox. The products are becoming more powerful, cheaper and more secure. I’ve seen applications that took 10 years to develop, get rebuilt in a digital platform in a month. It’s mind blowing, and incredibly exhilarating.
As innovators and leaders in cloud and digital, I believe we play a role in helping our clients succeed in their mission areas and radically changing the landscape for how our nation and citizens are served.
What’s your best career advice for those who want to follow in your footsteps?
First, take the time to truly get to know your clients and the specific business problems they are looking to get fixed, and then stay laser focused on making them successful. Read every Government Accountability Office report, listen to the congressional testimony about their agencies, read the president’s budget — just do anything and everything to understand your client and their missions.
Second, work really hard and find success in whatever role you’re asked to do. It took me the first 15 years of my career to land on what I really wanted to focus on which is cloud and digital platforms, but along the way, I always tried to learn as much as I could and be the best at whatever role I was expected to perform.
Third, be honest and clear about what your career goals are. A lot of times, people have ambitions they don’t share. If you own it and share it — you help others (and you) make it happen!