The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Pinnacle Awards were announced Oct. 13, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually Dec. 8.
Next is Cybersecurity Industry Executive of the Year (Public Company) finalist Jonathan Sholtis, who’s senior vice president of cybersecurity services at ICF. Here, he talks career turning points, learning from failures, key achievements and more.
What was a turning point or inflection point in your career?
In late 2017, I made the decision to leave a large IT and cybersecurity integrator company to join ICF. While ICF was very well-known and regarded for its industry expertise in public health, disaster management, energy, environment, climate and marketing and engagement, it was not a household brand name in cybersecurity and/or technology services.
This was especially true in the Department of Defense and intelligence community markets, where my former company had a very well-established brand and robust set of existing services in the federal space.
As a former naval officer whose entire higher education and professional career had been dedicated to the DOD and IC communities to that point, joining ICF offered both risk and reward.
During the interview process, ICF’s executive leadership team emphasized their commitment to technology and innovation as key to driving company growth, expanding the markets they serve and meeting the digital transformation needs of their clients. They emphasized that investing in innovation was at the core of their business strategy and that approach helped ICF double in size every 5 years over the past two decades.
Even though my wife and I were having our first child at the exact same time, I accepted the challenge to join ICF and grow their business as a leading cybersecurity services and solutions provider in the public sector.
Nearly 5 years later, I can say without a doubt that the most significant turning point in my career happened when I joined ICF.
What’s one key thing you learned from a failure you had?
In early 2020, we faced a competitive recompete process for a contract that was considered a cornerstone project of our DOD cybersecurity qualifications and past performance. Leading into the final solicitation, we failed to prevent the sponsor’s shift away from a best-value contract that required ICF to conduct applied research, development, deployment and operations of new and novel solutions in a government fee-for-service cybersecurity provider model.
Instead, the government chose to solicit the opportunity in a highly commoditized approach to buying operations and maintenance services only. Despite ICF’s highly rated technical and management scores, we lost this deal on price.
We took a pause to reflect upon this contract loss as it related to watershed moments like the SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange and FireEye exploits, to analyze how and where ICF stood against market trends and opportunities.
This introspection reminded us of the importance of harnessing the power of conducting applied research, development and integration of emerging and transformative technologies as part of our underlying go-to-market strategy and market differentiation. This renewed focus has directly contributed to many key achievements since.
What key achievements did you have in 2020/2021?
The pandemic accelerated what was already the largest disruption in technology and practices that we have seen in the past 50 years. While the transition to COVID-related protocols tested many organizations, our team was able to practice what we preach as it relates to team collaboration and product management.
This approach allowed us to not only survive but thrive, and achieve a number of industry firsts for our customers and ICF.
First, we were asked by the Defense Department chief information officer and U.S. Cyber Command to provide unique and critical cybersecurity service provider support to the unprecedented emergency operational provisioning of the Commercial Virtual Remote environment for pandemic virtual collaborations supporting 4 million-plus DOD users globally.
In under 30 days, our team was able to bolster zero trust and threat-hunting capabilities that addressed the dissolving perimeter and proliferation of distributed applications for millions of users that would now be accessing DOD systems and networks from nontraditional locations and devices.
Second, our team was able to secure our first-ever prime contract with the newly formed Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Despite a limited capture effort due to tight government timelines, we leaned into our data science experts to provide applied R&D and novel approaches, such as artificial intelligence, automation, cognitive search, computational analytics, machine learning and neural networks.
This gave us a considerable foundation of relevant intellectual property to include in our bid. Our “high confidence ratings” across all evaluation criteria combined with best-value pricing combined to deliver a win in a competitive landscape.
Third, we significantly expanded our position as a top researcher and innovator to maintain the U.S. Army’s technical edge and improve its chances of winning future conflicts through support to the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.
The advanced communication protocols, AI, ML and quantum computing capabilities and technologies we develop through secure cyber systems engineering, agile development and rapid prototyping models continue to enhance the Army’s ability to defend and respond to emerging and dynamic threats.
Finally, our team was selected by open-source technology provider Elastic as the 2021 Security Business Transformation Partner of the Year. As our primary platform for cognitive search, Elastic’s ability to penetrate functional and data siloes and to extract genuine business value from them presents a virtually infinite number of potential use cases for our customers.
What has made you successful in your current role?
Since my arrival in 2018, ICF has challenged my assumptions about what it means to lead a business unit. ICF leadership was clear that “achieving great financial results doesn’t equal success” and “what got you here won’t get you there” at this firm.
ICF is a mission-driven company with a rich culture and corporate values that guide all actions and interactions. I had to immerse myself in this culture to learn and understand how our purpose and values guided our growth of the business.
My team and I apply these values to each engagement. We bring our passion to our work and our clients. We work in unison as one team focused on listening and bringing the best solutions to our clients. And we respect and embrace each other’s differences, where every member of our team feels respected, included and heard. We’re now truly “greater than the sum of our individual parts.”
By living these values, I’ve been able to push myself and my team to develop an atmosphere that promotes innovation and collaboration to deliver value-added, outcome-oriented solutions to our clients.
What are your primary focuses going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
As the nation faces greater risks and vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure and nontraditional IT systems, we’re focusing our efforts on underlying technologies and technical subject matter areas that will bolster our digital solutions and resiliency services.
We’re looking beyond cybersecurity, heavily investing in applied mathematics, computation analytics, data science to include AI/ML and cognitive search, and secure systems engineering. These are areas where we believe we can make the most impact.