Juvy McCarthy
President, Technology Solutions and Products Group, Akima
As president of the Technology Solutions & Products Group at Akima, an Alaska Native Corporation, Juvy McCarthy has been instrumental in building a sustainable business for the company’s more than 14,000 Iñupiat shareholders.
When she began at one of Akima’s subsidiaries nearly 18 years ago, McCarthy set out to build an IT services business from scratch with the mission to create sustainable and profitable businesses for Akima’s shareholders in the hope that one day they could run their own companies.
By focusing on attracting and retaining top talent and maintaining a close working relationship with original equipment manufacturers, McCarthy’s business today has grown from less than $5 million and a handful of full-time employees to more than $700 million (projected for 2021) and 800-plus full-time employees.
Her portfolio of companies includes multiple Alaskan Native shareholders in leadership/technical positions with others poised to grow into those positions. Of the 10 companies in the portfolio, five have successfully graduated from the 8(a) program to continue in their growth and service to the federal government.
Akima has supported cybersecurity and incident response for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for over 10 years, achieving “ZERO Weakness” ratings in its FISMA audits. This project has deployed 200-plus security appliances and technologies and has identified and resolved 18,000-plus incidents with zero data breaches.
Another project team helped the Defense Health Agency quickly complete Risk Management Framework accreditation for a critical lab analyzer technology that speeds the processing of COVID-19 test results.
Why Watch
The Akima TSPG team is now in the fourth phase of an Air Force program to modernize data center infrastructure and replace and upgrade end of life servers, storage and network systems for 850,000 users worldwide. Working with Dell, Akima developed a replacement product platform in three discrete sizes to support different sized Air Force locations.
The team installed the new products at more than 100 sites with another 80 anticipated to be completed by summer 2022 — saving the Air Force $14 million in user IT support, reducing IT man hours by 200,000 and reducing ticket submission time from 1 hour to less than 10 minutes. McCarthy is now working with Dell and other OEMs to replicate the success of this modernization program for other Air Force bases and DOD branches.
But this is far from the only enterprise innovation McCarthy and her team are leading.
Under the Enterprise Technology Integration, Governance, Engineering, and Requirements II program, McCarthy’s team is providing support for both cultural and digital transformation of Army Human Resources Command systems to address key initiatives such as operational energy, multi-hybrid cloud and Data Services Layer-Army. And within Akima, McCarthy champions the Akima Women in Technology recognition program to highlight the formerly unsung merits of Akima’s women technologists.