Abt Associates holds an unusual position in the GovCon space. The consulting firm works specifically on human things: social, environmental and health related.
As senior vice president of U.S. domestic business, Christen Smith helps federal civilian agencies meet missions in those areas. We talked with her about the particular challenges government faces in these mission spaces, and how a government contractor can help them advance their efforts.
What are common challenges across the social, health and environmental mission sets?
Our clients are being asked to convert finite public resources into the best possible outcomes for public life. To do that, they have to have the best evidence available to guide them in making programmatic investments, and in creating policy parameters that are going to generate the greatest return.
They need to know what works, and they often need to know it quickly and within a dynamic landscape like a public health emergency, an economic downturn or a climate change-driven natural disaster.
They need to untangle a lot of complexity in order to get usable insights. There are varied factors that all impact human health and well-being, including social determinants of health, housing, education, nutrition, employment, the built and physical environment and many, many others. There’s a complex web of factors.
How does Abt Associates help?
We provide data-enabled and equity-centered research and implementation services. We help our clients generate game-changing insights, and then we also help them apply those to generate greater mission impact.
We have incredibly deep expertise across a full range of health determinants: infectious and chronic disease, healthcare access, economic development, mobility, housing, education. We help our clients connect the dots across disciplines and sectors, within that really complicated environment that contributes to human health and well-being.
That means connecting different sources of information to be able to understand how healthcare access, housing status, educational status, the economy ⏤ how all of these things correlate and cumulatively affect communities and individuals.
Increasingly, agencies coming to you for partnerships and co-creation. How is that playing out?
We need to equip our clients with better, more advanced ways of combining and processing data ⏤ the technical solution to this data challenge. But we also need to help them leverage data continuously as a mission asset, using data in day-to-day operations around the mission to gain new, better and usable insights.
That requires not just high digital acumen, but also a deep understanding of the policy domain and the mission space, as well as the day-to-day realities of the people served. It’s about understanding the whole landscape of needs and opportunities in a community.
We have the deep and broad domain expertise, and the pioneering data collection and data analysis methods, to help public sector entities understand the realities on the ground and connect to the people that they’re serving.
What’s the biggest challenge you face and how do you address it?
One of the key challenges in this space is being able to connect the dots. There are infrastructure and technical challenges when you start talking about connecting data sources ⏤ even just having the technical data infrastructure to be able to exchange data across agencies, across sectors ⏤ to put together these holistic pictures of health.
We really work at understanding the nodes at which all of these data sources could come together. Through its broad reach across different social determinants of health and at different levels of the public sector ⏤ federal, state, local, philanthropic ⏤ Abt Associates has been able to identify those opportunities. Our reach across that landscape helps us do that really well.
And what’s the practical outcome of that?
We can drive an understanding of how different organizations and sectors are working on a specific policy challenge where there are a lot of different stakeholders that need to come together. We can be that glue ⏤ the sharer of best practices, that partner that brings different entities together as well as the connector of information.
We can find those intersections, bring together different data sources and demonstrate how these are wins for the mission. We can show the agencies how combining different streams of data can reveal new solutions.
On a personal note, what makes this work meaningful for you?
I joined Abt Associates in April of this year. Before that, I’d spent over a decade in the federal consulting industry. My background is in public policy: I’ve always been drawn to these intersections that we’ve been talking about.
I’m drawn to complexity because I think all of us intuitively understand that there are no easy answers. If someone is offering you a single-threaded, easy answer, that is not going to be as effective in generating real, significant, meaningful impact.
Abt is all about problem-solving and co-creating with clients on the types of challenges that are really of interest to me, helping to deliver the government mission better. Abt Associates has such a broad reach of expertise; we are so well-positioned to work at those intersections, to tackle the complexity.