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 Cloud Industry Executive of the Year (Private Company) finalist Dan Naselius, who’s president and chief technology officer at CORAS. Here, he talks key achievements, learning from failures, primary focus areas going forward and more.
What key achievements did you have in 2020/2021?
This year has been a pivotal year for the whole team at CORAS. We have been in business for 15 years, but with every project, we refined our platform and included those enrichments to all customers going forward.
Now, we find ourselves at a premier level of functionality with a toolset designed for federal agencies and the Department of Defense. We continue to expand our work within the DOD, solving some of their most complex challenges and providing unique solution sets.
Achieving FedRAMP High status this year has been a triumphant win for us, but also an exciting opportunity for our customers. Being able to have a configurable SaaS offering with the highest security levels as an off-the-shelf product means we can serve federal civilian and DOD agencies efficiently and effectively.
CORAS had some important contract wins this year with the U.S. Navy and we are fast at work helping them with improved business processes and breaking up siloed data.
Client mission is our mission. CORAS is helping decision-makers work smarter with a toolset that aggregates data for live reporting but also uses AI to help humans see a complete story of information. We want to bring insight to all the data that is available but has been historically unavailable until now. CORAS’ AI is shining the light on dark data and more importantly, we are able to provide a spectrum of information as a result.
One of the capabilities that I’m most proud of is that our technology not only creates live data reporting, but it also allows us to see second-, third- and fourth-level consequences of actions that we want to take with our decisions. Never before has a software been able to reveal that level of detail or ability to serve at an enterprise level within the DOD due to the challenges around data security.
Not only is CORAS FedRAMP High, but we have invested in DOD Impact Level 5 providing the highest security settings and so we can deliver our solutions on a commercial, repeatable service that saves hundreds of thousands of man hours and can support the humans doing some of the most crucial work in the security of our nation.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
CORAS is focusing on understanding the DOD decision-making process and building out a suite of tools that allow people to make informed decisions, leveraging human intelligence and AI, historical information, the projections and predictions. In 2020, we brought into CORAS a rules engine that drives business processes through data driven alerts and KPIs.
In 2021, we are further enhancing the business process engine to allow for rich enterprise-class workflows that ensure that the customer not only can make data-driven decisions, but also ensure that it drive the teams daily work around those decisions.
Our mission is to constantly improve as we build a continuous learning system, bringing together AI technology points, root cause analysis engines, business process management, collaboration, and automation to transform the speed at which the government operates.
In order to respond to national security threats as well as domestic challenges, decision-makers need to have information at their fingertips. This is where CORAS shines and where we can provide not only value, but solutions that can give answers in moments that once took weeks.
This is a real opportunity for collaboration between the commercial sector and the DOD and federal civilian agencies; it has never been more needed. We see the threats to our nation and we can leverage automated processes to streamline reporting, budgeting, maintenance and systems in a way that lets human leaders understand and analyze the full information picture.
We’re able to create incredibly efficient environments with CORAS, saving man hours and doing the work that would have taken hundreds of staff members. In a moment of time, we are able to permanently address lost valuable information and make it usable, searchable, recordable and ready for analysis. That’s real decision management.
What’s one key thing you learned from a failure you had?
Go more towards a collaborative engagement changes to system and people take time and our ability to work with existing systems people and process is the basis of success. Every business is a people business. Creating a collaborative relationship and engagement with our clients is imperative to drive transformation within a department. Especially when you’re contending with siloed departments due to security parameters, we must demonstrate our ability to work with existing systems, people and processes.
In my experience, you need a champion in an organization who is there for the long term, who is invested and committed to seeing through a transformational initiative. Change is driven by passion and creativity. We need the leadership to be both committed to shrinking the time “from question to decision,” as well as be able to put in a system that ensures that the solution grows with the organization.
This is where the government leaders are critical, industry can’t do it alone. Industry brings interesting technology to bear, but without key people who know their agency and the critical decision needs, the result will not be as successful.
In the DOD, there is so much changeover of personnel. You need a key visionary to drive transformational initiative. When you have leadership transitions trying to hand over, vision is more than a challenge to continuity. I have learned that partnering with someone who will be there for the long haul is a key to success.