The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced April 15, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place virtually May 27.
Next is Chief Technology Officer Award finalist Jason Keplinger, who’s chief technical and innovation officer at T-Rex Solutions, LLC. Here, he talks professional achievements, primary focus areas going forward, professional risks and more.
What key achievements did you have in 2019/2020?
I had the privilege of being T-Rex’s chief technical and innovation officer focusing on technology adoption and simultaneously chief engineer on the $1.6 billion Census technical integrator program. These positions led to the most challenging achievement of my career, the first online Census ever in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had the opportunity to collaborate with a very forward-thinking customer, undertaking an incredibly innovative technological and organizational venture.
Supported by an amazing team and commitment to the mission, we designed and deployed a set of systems that could sustain over 1.2 million concurrent users, collect 148 million household responses, support 500,000 field workers who recorded data via smartphones, and technical support for 260 field offices.
Near the start of Census 2020 operations, we switched to a primarily remote workforce due to COVID-19 restrictions; shifting to collaboration tools, knowledge base and new business rhythms to enable 24/7 remote operational monitoring. Using technology and automation, we successfully executed the critical mission of response collection during the 2020 Census without a single outage. I believe the technology we employed helped protect the health and safety of the public.
The Census count began on March 12, which was also the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak. The first ever Internet Self Response was extended 3 months enabling greater no contact response collection, allowing enumerators to be delayed, until the end of summer when enough PPE was available. Therefore, the cloud technology allowed for a safer count and flexibility to meet the Census mission.
What has made you successful in your current role?
A CTO is responsible for the anticipation and integration of technology changes. I see this as part of my role at T-Rex, but what has made me successful is driving innovative thought, commitment to sharing knowledge and developing a strong team.
The first key to success is building a team and providing the tools to innovate. This starts with defining innovation: what is it and why we need it. This improves hiring and the recruitment. I also made sure the team held shared values that hiring diverse and innovative staff will improve our outcomes by bringing fresh perspective and experiences.
The second key to success is commitment to sharing knowledge. Through daily scrums, knowledge-based (videos and articles) and use of Kanban for task management, we continuously communicate across the organization.
Third is the strength of the team around me. All engineers in T-Rex report into my organization across our programs. This was a change to the organization in 2019 when we consolidated cybersecurity, agile system integration, infrastructure modernization and big data staff under my leadership, allowing for cross pollination of ideas across these disciplines. This creates a landscape that is more conducive for innovating in a DevSecOps and AIOps manner.
What are your primary focuses areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
My primary area of focus is reusable technical solutions for accelerating adoption and using organizational data to securely modernize our customers’ mission-critical systems.
We have learned a lot through modernizing mission-critical systems. That valuable knowledge can now be captured as automation, infrastructure as code and re-usable frameworks that provides value and avoids issues from Day Zero on contract.
One key area of focus is adopting a zero-trust security framework, specifically focusing on the integration of a trust engine and leveraging cyber resiliency to increase security across our government solutions. I am focused on implementing what we learned about multicloud/hybrid cloud financial, deployment, sizing, security and operational management to provide a single integrated view solution that government can use to accelerate adoption.
Using our internal T-Rex lab, The Hatchery, we continue enhancing and prototyping reusable solutions. We hold technology game days, lab projects, and bug bounties to bring the whole organization in to accelerate these frameworks
What’s the biggest professional risk you’ve ever taken?
The biggest professional risk I have taken was leaving my 20-year career with a large integrator where I was leading a program of over 1,000 engineers to work for T-Rex. At the time I joined, we had about 100 people working on our programs. The leadership’s vision of the future and challenge of doing something for the Census that had not been done before, for the first time in U.S history of having an online Census drew me to the position.
As our success grew on the Census Technical Integrator program, we reached over 1,000 people on our contracts expanding into multiple other federal agencies and across the Defense Department. The culture within T-Rex provides me with the flexibility of a small business, reacting quickly to our customer mission needs but the structure of a large business having successfully delivered large mission critical programs.