Government needs to revamp its processes and practices to sustain critical operations and adapt to evolving needs and technologies. As chief technology officer and president of the Workflow Automation Business Unit at SilverEdge Government Solutions, Vishal Desai is helping make that happen.
We caught up with him recently to talk about emerging issues in the federal sector, especially in the defense and intelligence communities, and about SilverEdge’s unique value proposition.
What common challenges do your government clients face these days?
Government wants to innovate. They want to keep pace with industry, to be ahead of our adversaries ⏤ and to achieve that they need to modernize. The foundation of modernization is automation, integration and organizational transformation. Forward-thinking leaders are focusing on improving infrastructure, back-office systems and user experiences. Within both the government civilian and DOD verticals, this common challenge remains.
At the same time, government doesn’t have the luxury to shut down and rebuild itself, because its services are critical to our nation’s interest. They need to revamp without interrupting operations.
How does SilverEdge help?
We focus on the Department of Defense and intelligence communities, where we support cybersecurity, automation, cloud transformation and business application enablement. Those are all areas where SilverEdge provides meaningful offerings for measurable outcomes.
Within the Workflow Automation Business Unit, the idea is that anything we see today, we expect to improve tomorrow. We are always assessing the existing way of doing business and considering how to leverage next-gen tools and methodologies to improve and streamline processes. “You had a 24/7 help desk and it was costing you 60 FTEs? Here’s a model where you can reduce that to zero.”
We create actionable dashboards that tell you what you need to do to remediate an issue. More importantly, we support automatic remediation through APIs and integrations and orchestration. And we are very happy doing this in firm fixed-price engagements, which removes the financial risk from the government’s portfolio while delivering a measurable outcome.
And how do you meet government’s need for uninterrupted operations, even as modernization unfolds?
At Silver Edge, we are used to revamping planes in mid-flight. That is one of our key differentiators: the ability to do things in real time, to transition from old ways of doing business to new ways while the business remains up and running seamlessly.
A key part of every engagement is ongoing updates to our customers. It’s akin to us building a house: The owners are with us in the buildout and they’re seeing progress as the house is constructed. Every week or two, we have a show-and-tell, which allows them to understand and further refine the outcome. Because organizational transformation is part of our approach, we have never had a failed project. By the time the solution goes live, everyone knows what it is and what it means.
We are using this model to transform SilverEdge’s internal processes as well. Everything we offer to government, we consume ourselves. We brought five companies together to form SilverEdge. Each entity had its own business processes: how they did the financials, talent acquisition, IT, contracts, security. You can’t have that many disparate tools and process, and still expect to function as one. So we are aligning, consolidating, streamlining and stitching them together.
SilverEdge now has a single onboarding process, a single security process and a single process for budgeting and financials. Leveraging our ServiceNow platform as a system of engagement and automation, we drive data to dashboards and visualization tools. This offers our CEO and senior leadership real-time, actionable data at their fingertips. Nimbleness remains our ally and we intend to harness it to the fullest.
What’s your growth strategy?
Our DNA has been within the intelligence community, and now we are looking to expand to the broader DOD sector, where they share a common mission, a common security posture. These modern capabilities — the transformation, the cybersecurity, the automation ⏤ are things that everyone wants and needs.
With that in mind, we are productizing some of our capabilities to achieve quick, accelerated outcomes. Instead of needing six months to derive an outcome, we’re reducing that by 60% or more. With our deep experiences in the private sector, we’re leveraging commercial best practices and cadence to deliver rapid solutions, rather than reinventing the wheel.
What’s the biggest challenge you face, and what do you do about it?
We need to make sure we continue to be ahead of the need, and not just reacting to it. How are we going to keep on improving? What did we do yesterday that we need to foundationally enhance and change?
That requires engineering rigor. To that end, SilverEdge created an Innovation Center to bring new and emerging capabilities into our lab and validate their applicability for the scenarios we are trying to solve. Having that platform is critical for our success, and we have invested in that.
We also are investing in our people. The ongoing certifications, with tailored mentoring, ensure our knowledge level remains the highest in industry. We continue to encourage broadening our people’s business skills beyond technical layers ⏤ it is critical to understand our customer’s missions to craft an impactful capability.
On a personal note, what makes this work interesting or meaningful for you?
I have worked for the government and have been in government services for decades, across different sectors of government ⏤ intelligence community, DOD, civilian and state levels. It’s important and it’s rewarding because herein lies improvement opportunities that impact so many people.
Anything you observe, anything you touch in government, we view it as an opportunity to improve and enhance. I like that a lot, the ability to make a difference and advance our nation’s interests.