As one of Leidos’ most senior executives, Vicki Schmanske has had a significant impact on the success of the company, and 2020 was no exception.
In the past, Leidos had a combined defense and intelligence organization. In that environment, the intelligence work wasn’t receiving the focus required to grow. The company recognized this market is unique and demanded solutions tailored to the intelligence community’s needs.
In light of that, Leidos stood up the Intelligence Group at the beginning of 2019 under Schmanske’s leadership. This strategic move has continued to benefit the company and its customers throughout 2020 and remains one of Schmanske’s biggest milestones.
As leader of Leidos’ Intelligence Group, Schmanske has been instrumental in developing a strategy that opened up new markets in enterprise IT, cybersecurity, mission software and space technologies. Additionally, the Intelligence Group resurrected a declining business with year-over-year growth. Through key wins in every market, the Intelligence Group is growing its direct workforce and has a strong pipeline of opportunities.
Additionally, Leidos’ Intelligence Group’s Workforce Pillars focuses on inclusion and diversity, talent recruitment and selection, as well as employee engagement and leadership. This initiative reflects the value of Leidos’ people and Schmanske’s priority to develop and retain talent for opportunities. These efforts have improved recruiting and helped reduce attrition by more than 6%.
Why Watch
In 2021, Leidos will continue delivering secure solutions to help safeguard the nation. Schmanske’s two primary focus areas are supporting the customers’ missions and empowering the workforce to execute this important work.
The customers’ missions are not slowing down in the face of ever-changing adversarial threats. To neutralize those threats, the Intelligence Group has focused its efforts on cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, transformative software and analytics in the coming year.