The finalists for WashingtonExec’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards were announced Sept. 25, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person Nov. 16.
Next is DoD Executive of the Year finalist in the Private Company category, CEO and chief technology officer at BrainGu. Here, he talks about his focus areas going forward and breaking industry rules.
What are your focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
For myself and for BrainGu, I’m focused on scaling our delivery through product mechanisms. With a consulting model, we could only reach so many missions while at the same time setting ourselves in a competitive mode with all of the amazing companies in this ecosystem. As a product offering, we can help 100s or 1000s of missions while becoming a key collaborative partner to the ecosystem. Making it easier, faster, and safer to deliver software is a critical enabler for advancing America and our allies. My day is spent ensuring more have access to this capability.
Which rules do you think you should break more as a government/industry leader?
I believe that the status quo for technology solutions isn’t effective and won’t scale sufficiently to match growth in the problem space. Generally speaking, technology work is done by groups of individual “artisans” with each person working their tools against a single scoped goal. The focus tends to be on achieving impacts through adding more labor over innovation ⏤ seeking qualified individuals and growing ever larger groups.
To maximize capability, we must reorient around a focus on outputs ⏤ what value is being delivered ⏤ over inputs such as labor/headcount/hours. Despite the current rule of thumb in our industry, more people isn’t the same as more delivery.