Top CIOs to Watch in 2020

Christie Nader

Chief Information Officer, Perspecta Inc.

Christie Nader joined Perspecta last summer, and in just over a year, her team has done a lot — including finishing major integration efforts merging the three original companies that formed Perspecta, acquiring and integrating two additional companies and flexing operationally to handle COVID-19.

What Nader is most proud of, though, is seeing her team successfully create a technology platform on which the original three legacy companies, plus the two newly acquired companies, can all function as “One Perspecta” — enhancing operations and communications to better support its customers.

This approach involved all new corporate applications for finance, HR, business development, communications, compliance, legal, security and updating all the infrastructure in multiple data centers, 60 offices and multiple cloud environments.

To make all this happen, without significantly disrupting the work of 20,000 users who daily support Perspecta customers, wasn’t easy, Nader said.

“Did we experience some hiccups along the way? Of course! However, they were minor compared to the value-add obtained from the project,” she said.

These efforts have provided a set of tools for Perspecta to leverage for internal operational efficiencies and strategically positioned the company to handle continued growth.

Perspecta’s strategic initiative to create a flexible hybrid cloud model has been key in advancing its mission of partnering with the business to support program execution and growth. At the same time, this also helped with its COVID-19 “new normal” business operating model.

“We migrated to almost all cloud-based enterprise systems with a single sign-on platform allowing a great majority of work to be done remotely regardless of network or device,” Nader said. “One component of that was transitioning to Microsoft 365, which provides an abundance of flexibility with office productivity and communication.”

Why Watch

Now that the foundation has been laid for the five companies to create One Perspecta, the next step is to use all the features within the new enterprise applications to increase the business value of them for customer support and to upgrade the company’s corporate functions, Nader said.

“It’s no secret that with the more data you have, the better informed your decisions can be,” she added. “By leveraging this data, and implementing new technology and automation, we can handle greater volumes of work systematically so the rest of the workforce can spend their time focused on growing our business. I am extremely excited to help Perspecta realize this goal.”