Christian Hoff, director of U.S. federal civilian and health for Amazon Web Services, has been appointed chair of the WashingtonExec Federal Civilian Council for 2023-2024.
In his position, Hoff supports cabinet-level civilian agencies and departments, including military health and civilian intelligence customers. He also leads cross-functional teams focused on helping customers address executive orders and improve citizen experiences.
Before taking on the director role at AWS, Hoff led the Federal System Integrator and Solutions Team. He also spent over 10 years at Booz Allen Hamilton as a principal, leading business units focused on the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff, and five years as a vice president of business development at General Dynamics/Anteon.
As a retired lieutenant colonel, former active duty Army medical service corps officer and former reservist in the Quartermaster Corps, Hoff brings decades of cross-sector experience in sales, operations, business development, program management and strategy to the chair position. He was also named “Top Cloud Executive to Watch” in 2021 and 2023.
Below, Hoff shares more about his experience and perspective he brings to the Federal Civilian Council, what he hopes to accomplish as chair, plans in the works and more.
Based on your extensive experience, what are some of the focus areas/hot topics you want to discuss with the council this year?
For those of us working in the federal sector, helping government agencies to modernize the citizen experience is a timely and relevant topic. The Biden administration’s Executive Order on “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government” represents an important milestone in trying to meet end-user expectations. The directive seeks to reshape Americans’ interactions with the government by holding flagship agencies “accountable for designing and delivering services with a focus on the actual experience of the people whom it is meant to serve,” rather than merely streamlining the services within individual silos.
It also presents federal leaders with an opportunity to rethink how they process and administer a wide range of federal services, from retirement payments, health care benefits, and food subsidies, to federal grants, education and housing loans and taxes.
To truly elevate the customer experience for Americans, agencies will need to capitalize on a combination of technology and human-centered design. The council provides an opportunity for continued conversations across industry and government on the opportunities presented by enabling technologies, like the cloud, and the transformation process that must be undertaken to deliver solutions that drive efficiencies, reduce costs and further improve the customer experience.
What impactful technology topics within the federal civilian community are you looking forward to discussing with the council?
There are plenty of trends we see across federal government agencies, with customers looking to take greater advantage of innovation and new or emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as edge and high-performance computing.
We are currently in the golden age of ML. The seeds of an ML paradigm shift have existed for decades, but with the ready availability of virtually infinite compute capacity, a massive proliferation of data, and the rapid advancement of ML technologies, customers across government and industry are adopting and using ML technologies to transform their organizations.
Amazon has invested heavily in the development and deployment of AI and ML for more than two decades for both customer-facing services and internal operations, from the recommendation engines that personalize the shopping experience on Amazon.com to the AI-powered robots that optimize order fulfillment in our warehouses.
We are now going to see the next wave of widespread adoption of ML, with the opportunity for every customer experience and application to be reinvented with generative AI. AWS will help drive this next wave by making it easy, practical, and cost-effective for customers to use generative AI in their business.
Our approach to generative AI is to invest, innovate and take this technology out of the realm of research and make it available to customers of any size and developers of all skill levels.
High-performance computing is another topic I look forward to addressing as it’s an area that we see as being an enabler of IT modernization and innovation for government customers. AWS helps our customers run large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads in the cloud with a complete suite of HPC products and services.
With HPC, we can help our government customers gain insights faster, and quickly move from idea to mission enablement with virtually unlimited compute capacity, a high-performance file system and high-throughput networking.
Do you feel there is great value in connecting industry executives with government officials to discuss topics facing the federal civilian community? If so, why?
At AWS, we pride ourselves on turning our customers’ challenges into opportunities to invent and innovate. That really goes back to customer obsession, which underlies everything we do. Customer obsession is our first leadership principle, and we tend to use the word “customer” frequently at Amazon, but federal agencies may use different words to describe the unique types of customers they support.
For example, their customers could be constituents or residents who receive some type of service from the agency or organization. Or they may have internal customers who work in another part of the agency or organization.
For industry executives, it’s important to understand the federal agencies they support and the needs of the government officials responsible for them – as well as the customers or constituents they serve. Referring back to Amazon’s customer obsession principle, this allows all of us to help turn challenges into opportunities and discover new ways of inventing and innovating to address government agencies’ mission-critical needs.
Based on your experience leading the Federal Civilian business at AWS, what is something you look forward to sharing with the council and the federal civilian community?
AWS is known for driving a culture of innovation, and we find many federal organizations asking us: “How does Amazon innovate?”
Defining the term “innovation” can mean different things to different people and organizations. For some, it could mean making small improvements to what they’ve always done. To others, it could mean dreaming up something new and completely unprecedented ⏤ ultimately reinventing a business or public service.
Regardless of where anyone is starting, I look forward to sharing more about Amazon’s approach to innovation ⏤ which centers on four pillars that help us innovate on behalf of our customers: culture, mechanisms, architecture and organization.
What does it mean to you to be chairperson for this council, and what do you hope councilmembers get out of your leadership?
As chairperson, I look forward to further building relationships with members of the group and having an opportunity to connect with AWS partners and customers. I believe there is great value in hearing directly from government officials on what is critical to them, and how industry can help support their critical missions. I believe this council provides an opportunity for continued discussion and collaboration in support of the American people.