The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced March 17, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person May 10.
Next is CEO finalist in the Private Company: Annual Revenue <$100M category Burton White, the co-founder and CEO of Excella. Here, he talks key achievements, primary focus areas going forward and more.
What key achievements did you have in 2022/2023?
I’m especially proud of our employee engagement over the last 18 months. In an extraordinarily tight labor market and in the midst of “the great resignation,” we focused on Excellian engagement and yielded a huge increase in retention and a record-breaking year in recruiting.
We identified and focused on three value drivers in the Excellian experience that best cultivate exceptional careers: meaningful work every day, personalized growth and development, and awesome colleagues who inspire.
- We’re succeeding in providing Excellians meaningful work as we’ve doubled our pipeline value and experienced 47% growth in contracts secured over the last two years that involves helping clients transform via AI, legacy modernization, and evolving how clients think about tech.
- To enable more personalized growth and development, we clarified and expanded career paths for Excellians, better matching career interests to opportunities.
- We also created new, Excellian-driven learning opportunities, enabling Excellians to share their knowledge with each other and connect remotely.
- Rather than asking Excellians to come back to the office, we developed new, meaningful ways to connect Excellians distributed across the nation, including learning together, engaging in the community together, and unifying around new approaches to impact our clients.
What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?
I’m most proud of the programs I’ve been part of creating that create community impact across three dimensions. Each dimension reflects distinct ways we live out our philosophy to have a lasting impact on our clients, colleagues and communities.
- Communities where we live: Our community impact program, ImpaX, enables Excellians to help families experiencing homelessness to gain self-sufficiency. We have focused on this single cause over many years to optimize our impact as we learn the issues, build relationships with the organizations addressing them, and execute multi-year projects to make a difference. To date, Excellians have provided pro bono consulting and technology creation, gotten their hands dirty painting apartments for families, and assisted in fundraising and board service. As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded this to include partnering with organizations across the nation addressing homelessness.
- Professional communities: We engage with our tech and other professional communities to realize a vision we call “connect, share, and learn.” Executing this vision uplifts the whole community, enables Excellians to learn from and lead in the community and brings great new ideas to Excella that impact our clients. Core to our approach is leading, sponsoring and/or hosting dozens of meet-ups. We started this in the DC area and are now growing it in other communities where Excellians live. For example, I recently spoke about building tech ecosystems for a community at “Agile NOLA”, a meet-up in New Orleans started by Excellians. We consider this community engagement to be core to our strategy ⏤ it’s a primary source for recruiting and creates countless learnings that impact our clients. We invest in this through sponsorship of the groups, but more importantly by giving Excellians time to lead and speak at the events and rewarding them for doing so through recognition and career paths focused on this community engagement.
- Equity in the tech community: Excellians are passionate about making the tech community more diverse, inclusive, and equitable so that technology can reach its full potential to serve humankind. Excellians do this starting inside and working out into the community. We have made inclusivity and engaging diversity part of our strategy and an expectation of every Excellian, especially leaders. We support this through shared learning, self-exploration, and setting standards for inclusivity. The most powerful aspect is Excellians sharing their own experiences as members of marginalized communities in ways that open the eyes and hearts of their Excella colleagues including me. We bring the expectation of inclusivity and diversity outside of Excella by incorporating them into how we work every day with our clients. We also bring them into the community through leadership, sponsorship, and engagement in groups focused on creating equitable tech careers for all interested professionals. There is much more work to do to achieve equity in tech and we’re proud to engage our community to do so.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
An exciting focus for Excella and me is our new approach to helping clients create high performing technology and teams. We’ve adopted a set of practices and capabilities proven through extensive research to drive high performance in technology, indicated by high resilience, flexibility, stability and frequent software updates. These same practices and capabilities are also proven to drive performance and high engagement, enablement, and job satisfaction for the teams working on that technology.
This is especially exciting for Excella because these practices and capabilities simultaneously enable both aspects of our purpose “to cultivate exceptional careers for Excellians by creating meaningful solutions for our clients.” This is important work for Excellians, our clients, and the nation because it leads to better technology to support citizens and the important missions of our federal agencies.
Another important focus for Excella is ethical creation and use of technology. With daily headlines about moral and ethical dilemmas in the application of AI, privacy and security of personal information, and accessibility of tech to everyone, it’s become increasingly important that we bring our clients not only technical expertise, but also capabilities in navigating these ethical dilemmas.
We’re doing so by educating clients on the issues, ensuring diversity in backgrounds and perspective on our teams, and eliminating bias from data used in our AI models or the user research that informs our solutions. We believe the next phase of tech evolution will introduce more ethical challenges than technical and we are enabling our clients as leaders on this critical frontier.