The federal civilian market touches all aspects of life, spanning health, commerce, agriculture, energy, treasury, veterans affairs, education, homeland security and beyond. The companies serving these agencies are committed, mission-oriented and driven by innovation, and are providing the secure emerging technologies the government needs.
But this doesn’t happen without strong leadership. For WashingtonExec’s inaugural Top 10 Civilian Executives to Watch in 2019 list, we identified the best of the best based on their accomplishments, impact on the civilian community and vision for the near-term future — bringing exactly what civilian agencies need to innovate and evolve.
Kristine Martin Anderson, Executive Vice President and Civilian Services Group Lead, Booz Allen Hamilton
In 2018, Kristine Martin Anderson transitioned from heading Booz Allen Hamilton’s health business to leading the firm’s entire civil business portfolio, which serves federal clients in health care, homeland security, justice, transportation, energy and financial services. Last year was also an exciting year of growth for the Civil team as it continued to innovate on digital, artificial intelligence and cyber solutions to enable client missions.
These types of innovative solutions, fortified with deep mission knowledge, are enabling Booz Allen to get closer to the core of the civilian missions and the citizen experience, according to Anderson.
And one of Booz Allen’s primary differentiators is the firm’s ability to deliver the type of talent and solutions that enable clients’ most critical missions. Many organizations can sell technology or mission knowledge alone, but Booz Allen’s combination of mission understanding, advanced technical capability, and consulting heritage gets the best results. The firm can quickly mobilize experienced, specialized talent from around the organization to help clients transform.
Booz Allen aspires to have a profound impact on how citizens experience their tech-enabled government. The firm is constantly evaluating and testing new technologies to keep up with the explosive pace of change. In particular, human-centered design, agile development, artificial intelligence, cloud and mobile technologies, and secure DevOps have shown scaled impact and opportunity.
Why Watch:
Anderson is interested in testing new consulting delivery models enabled by innovation in contracting. She believes the government can simultaneously shift more risk and provide more flexibility to contractors to innovate. The ultimate example of that would be outcome-based contracts. She also remains steadfastly committed to growing a diverse leadership team across Booz Allen’s Civil business. Anderson believes it is critical to connect talent to new and challenging opportunities to facilitate the growth and development of the next generation of diverse leaders.
Stefan Becker, Senior Vice President, Regulatory Agency Programs, CGI Federal
Partnering with CGI Federal clients spanning federal, state and local, and commercial industries, while serving in numerous leadership roles across seven countries, Stefan Becker’s constant has been his passion for turning data into value. As senior vice president and the leader of the growing Regulatory Agency Programs business unit of CGI Federal, he continues to leverage global best practices from private and public sectors to help make data more accessible to federal regulatory agencies and enable them to share data and insights among their stakeholders.
Becker began his career 25 years ago at AMS (later acquired by CGI), working initially as a statistician and predictive modeler for banking and telecommunications clients. Some of his earliest work included writing the predictive scorecards that drove credit limit decisions for credit card offerings. He later served as a leader in CGI’s global Tax, Revenue and Collections Practice, where his work used data analytics to help tax agencies make tax audit and compliance determinations.
In 2007, CGI’s corporate leadership tapped Becker’s expertise to help drive the company’s own investment decisions related to its offering and intellectual property. Reporting to CGI’s chief technology officer, Becker worked with CGI experts worldwide to monitor market and technology trends to evolve the CGI portfolio of business solutions for the public sector market.
Driven by an affinity for the mission-orientation of the federal government, Becker came to CGI Federal in 2011, managing CGI’s relationship with major federal agencies. In the fall of 2018, he was appointed to lead CGI Federal’s regulatory agency portfolio. Becker’s expanding team offers end-to-end IT and business consulting services in areas such as digital transformation, citizen engagement initiatives, operational excellence and workforce optimization.
Why Watch:
Becker’s passion keeps him at the forefront of emerging technologies and analytics. His group is conducting research and partnering with regulatory agencies to advance their missions in SecDevOps, cyber analytics, intelligent process automation, advanced data visualization and combining Earth observation data modeling with data derived from the internet of things. His commitment to bringing commercial best practices and technology to the federal government keeps Becker focused on enhancing agencies’ use of open standards, private-public partnerships, data accessibility and data sharing.
“It is an exciting time to be in federal IT, in particular assisting federal agencies with bringing the concepts of data engineering and analytics to life,” Becker said. “In the age of digital transformation, exploring the power of data is the next frontier.”
While successfully growing CGI Federal’s regulatory civilian portfolio to a backlog of 5.8 times the revenue, Becker personally still engages in consulting engagements with his client executives, such as helping a cabinet-level CTO develop the enterprisewide cloud strategy for the agency.
Mile Corrigan, Vice President of Federal Civilian Solutions, Noblis
Under Mile Corrigan’s leadership, Noblis’ Federal Civilian Solutions business achieved many important goals in 2018. Corrigan’s most significant achievement is her continued focus on promoting a collaborative, ethical and growth-oriented culture.
In addition to achieving business growth objectives for the FCS business unit, Corrigan’s leadership has resulted in a high retention rate amid a highly competitive talent market in the science and technology sector. She provides leadership, development and mentoring of leaders and early-career staff to achieve sustainable outcomes for Noblis — focusing on the long-term success of the organization.
Corrigan continues to provide transparent and open leadership to employees to enhance the company’s agile, innovative and engaging culture. In 2019, for the sixth year in a row, Noblis was named a top employer among large companies in The Washington Post’s annual “Top Workplaces” list. Noblis ranked 12th overall and was rated as the top professional services firm.
“Innovation is our common thread and our key differentiator across the federal landscape,” Corrigan said. “We’re a dynamic science, technology and strategy organization dedicated to creating forward-thinking technical and advisory solutions in the public interest. Our research and development focus enables Noblis to deliver capabilities ahead of customer mission needs, empowering our clients with cutting edge technology solutions to effectively modernize infrastructure, transform the delivery of digital services, and translate data into actionable information for critical decision-making.”
And Noblis is working in several emerging tech areas, such as quantum computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, software-defined networking, heterogeneous/edge computing, robotic process automation and blockchain.
“Across these areas, we have a proven track record of applying technology at scale to advance our client missions,” Corrigan added.
Why Watch:
An important area of focus for Noblis and Corrigan’s business area is the increased level of connectivity and the rise of self-organizing autonomous systems that will need to coordinate and collaborate across air, space, land and sea. Noblis plans to continue to advance research and technology investments to achieve autonomy at scale.
”We will continue to develop and implement prototype systems using our award-winning Pieces of Eight framework for orchestrated autonomy enabled by blockchain technology,” Corrigan said. The Noblis’ Po8 concept demonstrates how the motions and actions of unfamiliar, connected and autonomous machines can operate in a safer and more productive environment.
Noblis is also in the process of publishing several whitepapers on the current and future state of autonomy, exploring use cases for autonomous systems in adversarial and cooperative environments while addressing cybersecurity and interoperability challenges.
Shannon Fitzgerald, Senior Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton
Booz Allen Hamilton’s civil work spans the full breadth of civil government — and “there’s a lot to be proud of,” said Shannon Fitzgerald, who leads the firm’s work to modernize citizen services. “It’s work I’m truly passionate about, because we are helping people connect to the resources and the help they need.”
One project with major impact Fitzgerald worked on was with the Internal Revenue Service to reinvent the taxpayer experience — moving from call centers with long wait times to on-demand and seamless interactions.
“Our team has developed and improved more than 25 digital products, including IRS.gov and the IRS2Go app,” Fitzgerald said. “With a digital-first strategy, we’ve helped the IRS boost yearly revenue from electronic payments by $62 billion in four years while putting digital government into the hands of taxpayers.”
She is also proud of Booz Allen’s work with the Labor Department as it leveraged artificial intelligence to improve websites, apps and call centers, including Benefits.gov. And in 2018, the company relaunched Recreation.gov with human-centered design, agile development, secure DevOps and cloud technologies.
What sets Booz Allen apart is its problem-solving, according to Fitzgerald.
“We design solutions that lead with the client’s mission, which we know so well, and then apply our knowledge of emerging technologies and innovations to get to the art of the possible: future mission delivery, versus just a series of incremental modifications but not true transformation,” she added.
It’s also the company’s real passion for service and making a difference. She encourages her team members to always seek out work they’re passionate about and tries to do the same herself. Fitzgerald believes by challenging boundaries, the government can catch up to the private sector, allowing citizens to access information, apply for services and get the help they need when they need it.
Why Watch:
Fitzgerald’s focus for 2019 is the future.
“Envisioning how innovation and technology modernization can bring better mission delivery to our clients, and what’s next,” she said. Booz Allen will be focused on partnering with its clients to give them even more actionable insights, better security and improved flexibility through their intelligence, cloud and mobile tools.
“And we’ll be focused on the citizen,” Fitzgerald added. In 2018, she published “The Citizen’s Digital Bill of Rights,” which outlines the five expectations she believes citizens have the right to require from their digital government tools.
Jack Ginsburg, Vice President/Executive Leader, Growth, Federal Civilian Division, GDIT
With over 35 years of experience spanning government and commercial enterprises around the world, Jack Ginsburg has significant expertise in business development and service delivery. He has led the successful development and implementation of domestic and international business plans for multiple new market segments. He has designed and implemented corporate marketing, branding and communications strategies, and has extensive experience in establishing strategic alliances and maintaining successful partnership relationships.
Prior to joining GDIT, Ginsburg was vice president of business development for government and commercial markets in North America for Serco, tasked with Serco’s growth in the region’s federal, defense, intelligence, state government and commercial markets. He oversaw Serco’s resurgence and growth and was ultimately responsible for securing several very large federal government and international contracts.
In recent years, Ginsburg served as the senior vice president of sales and corporate marketing for Daon Trusted Identity Services. He was also senior vice president of MAXIMUS, where he oversaw sales and business development and the exponential growth of revenue resulting from state and local government health and human services-related sales.
Why Watch:
As the executive leader/vice president for growth, Ginsburg is responsible for all business development and capture resources and activities, as well as the development and execution of the business development strategies and processes that enables the GDIT Federal Civilian Division to expand an already significant footprint in the federal civilian market.
Angela Heise, President, Civil Group, Leidos
As president of Leidos’ Civil Group, Angela Heise is proud of several milestones and achievements her team realized in 2018. The Civil Group is a $3.4 billion segment of Leidos with 9,500 employees, whose work spans from glaciers to galaxies — ranging from operating the world’s longest supply chain to Antarctica to packing 35,000 pounds of cargo each year for the International Space Station.
With such a diverse range of programs, Heise focused on driving a culture of innovation across the organization in 2018. These innovations contributed to revenue growth of 3.6% from the prior year and set the organization up for success in 2019 and beyond.
An innovation Heise is particularly excited about is the algorithm development to benefit transportation security stakeholders. Currently, Leidos has deployed over 600 Reveal dual-energy computed tomography explosives detection systems at over 200 airports worldwide.
“My group is focused on homeland security solutions, and that team transformed the Reveal product’s algorithms to detect opioids in mailed packages at international mail facilities and express courier consignment facilities,” Heise said. The prototyping has led to a 3,000% increase in mail inspection efficiency.
But most of all, Heise said she’s extremely proud of the accomplishments her team made in helping customers achieve their missions.
“We continue to help modernize infrastructure, systems and security by offering transformative IT, expert logistics, and proven inspection technologies for government and highly regulated commercial customers,” she said.
And according to Heise, Leidos differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on technology, customer relationships, key personnel and past performance.
Currently, AI and data analytics are helping Leidos advance its customers’ missions, whether it’s around SecDevOps so agencies can be more efficient in developing applications for their end users or around RPA to automate certain tasks to use resources more effectively.
Why Watch:
Going forward, Heise plans to continue focusing on technology, customer relationships and employee engagement.
“This year, my team has been focused on continuing to apply technology that enables our customers’ missions,” she said. “We help our customers achieve their missions and technology goals by delivering purpose-built solutions with cybersecurity as a standard, efficient project delivery, and end-user satisfaction.”
She also remains a strong advocate of talent development and a champion for several employee engagement and training programs within Leidos. Heise plans to maintain those activities while leading her team to grow in digital transformation, global security products and services, and mission software systems.
Billy Morrissey, Vice President & General Manager, Civilian Division, ASRC Federal
When Billy Morrissey joined ASRC Federal’s IS&T Civilian group in July 2018, the organization was in the process of completing the integration of two recent acquisitions.
“We developed a strategy to move into the national security market with a focus on homeland security while expanding our market presence in our incumbent civilian accounts,” Morrissey said.
After establishing its strategic objectives, Morrissey built a team of market-focused leaders and subject matter experts to drive execution and growth across select customer accounts and set division-level priorities focused on customer needs, program delivery, growth targets, and personnel development and mentorship.
“This renewed direction has resulted in stronger customer relationships, improved delivery, greater connection with employees, a robust pipeline and year-over-year increases on orders, revenue, profit and cash,” Morrissey added. “At the heart of our success is an organization of talented employees who care deeply for their customers and work, being led by a passionate leadership team.”
ASRC Federal takes an innovative customer and mission-centric approach to every opportunity, bringing technology and partnering solutions forward to drive enhanced end-user service, according to Morrissey. This results in modernization of technology and platforms that align to desired business processes — not processes that work around legacy technology.
“It is also important to understand the culture of our customers as we recommend ways to drive business process and mission improvements,” Morrissey added.
And ASRC Federal leverages the technology to support mission areas including cloud, mobile device management, customer relationship management, IT service management, personnel management and more. While ASRC Federal is technology agnostic, it invests in vendor and platform partnerships with top-tier technology companies as well as in-house talent to develop and tailor solutions to solve its clients’ challenges.
Why Watch:
Morrissey is focused on executing the strategy that builds on the company’s current relationships and capabilities along with prioritized investments in emerging markets for ASRC Federal in the civilian and national security space.
“I’ll be leveraging data-driven metrics and customer feedback to drive continuous improvement on program delivery and financial performance,” he said.
Other priorities include developing future leaders through mentorship and providing exceptional opportunities for the team through the growth of the company’s business. ASRC Federal will also focus on cross-company use of resources and strategic industry partnerships to drive value for its customers and Inupiaq shareholders.
Sanjay Sardar, Vice President, Modernization and Digital Transformation, SAIC
According to the company Vice President of Modernization and Digital Transformation Sanjay Sardar, one of SAIC’s notable successes of 2018 was establishing itself as a leading partner in the General Services Administration Centers of Excellence work.
“We won awards on three of the COEs — Data Analytics Capacity Building, Data Visualization and Analytics, and Infrastructure Optimization Cloud Adoption — and we’re excited to support the implementation of this innovative procurement strategy,” Sardar said.
Sardar says he’s proud to help guide the development of SAIC’s IT modernization strategy, ensuring a strong focus on cloud migration, cyber, infrastructure optimization, and analytics. This effort helped to reaffirm SAIC’s presence as a leading technology integrator.
SAIC is the second largest pure-play technology integrator in government services, with a deep understanding of its customers’ missions.
“We have the scale and resources to help them navigate their future, share real experiences and capabilities across our customers, and identify best solutions,” Sardar added.
The company grew up in a mission-focused world, and has set itself apart by first developing solutions that begin with mission understanding, and then integrating the technologies and strategic alliance partners necessary to create successes for its customers.
“We focus on technologies that are applicable to our customers in both the short term and the long term,” Sardar said.
SAIC has made significant investments in areas like AI technology to support improved service desk functionality and cybersecurity. It is also supporting enhanced mobile development and robotic process automation to help its government customers streamline their operations and focus more of their valuable time and resources on meeting their mission needs.
“Finally, we continue to develop advanced analytics tools and techniques that help agencies make better decisions and create a data driven culture,” Sardar added.
Why Watch:
SAIC will continue to focus on helping agencies implement their unique IT modernization journeys. Each agency is at a different stage in the process, and each differs in its needs and goals.
“We will deliver the best talent and technology to support them in this effort,” Sardar said.
Rocky Thurston, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Civilian, State and Local Business Group, Perspecta
Since Perspecta’s launch in June 2018, the company has worked to become a leading systems integrator with deep mission knowledge and premier IT capabilities, and brings that same expertise to its civilian, state and local customers daily.
The group’s Senior Vice President and General Manager Rocky Thurston is most proud to have joined this team of “brilliant people who work tirelessly to help customers like the U.S. Postal Service, Department of Homeland Security and the county of San Diego work faster, smarter and more efficiently,” he said.
Thurston also noted Perspecta exceeded all financial targets for its first fiscal year, which closed March 31.
“To me, this is the most significant business-related achievement a company can reach, and a true indication of our growth and potential,” he said.
And it’s Perspecta’s real, practical and delivered innovation that stands out.
“As a fresh brand in the market, we offer bold thinking with proven discipline through a combination of advances in emerging technologies coming out of our applied research arm, Perspecta Labs, combined with model-based systems engineering rigor,” he said. “And we do it all.”
Currently, Perspecta is tackling several of the nation’s most complicated and important challenges delivering insight and experience gained from serving all aspects of its federal, state and local governments. It’s also advancing federal missions with emerging technologies such as cyber and cloud.
Perspecta helps its customers understand the benefits and tradeoffs of maintaining their current environment versus transitioning to a public, private or hybrid cloud solution, and helping to define, develop and deploy a clear cloud strategy regardless of how complex or unique the environment. All while managing the resiliency, security and latency of critical mission systems.
“To do this, we maintain a strict cyber discipline and offer leading-edge capabilities to prevent, protect and defend against cyber threats,” Thurston said. “Moreover, we continue to evolve the next generation of the agile DevSecOps landscape to produce some of the most sophisticated systems in the world.”
Additionally, Perspecta is working with data analytics and AI to go beyond traditional data mining so its customers can make assured, data-driven and insightful decisions.
Why Watch:
Thurston’s top priorities are to bring every capability Perspecta offers to the nation, state and local communities — while setting a new standard for quality customer service. He also wants to create a work environment that continues to produce great talent and draws in new people who want to be part of an exceptional team, solving seemingly unsolvable problems.
Mark Valcich, US Federal Civilian Director, Intel Corp.
Mark Valcich directs Intel Corp.’s US Federal Civilian business, relationships and engagements. He works with government leaders, architects and engineers to exchange technology innovation information, use cases and reference architecture.
in 2018, Valcich led his team educating the federal government about hybrid-multi cloud strategy and architecture, AI and data science. He and the Intel team are deeply engaged with the federal partner and contracting ecosystem to rapidly bring the consistent roadmap of Moore’s Law and technology business value to the government with solutions and reference architectures.
And as a company, Intel aims to disrupt industries and solve global challenges. It invents at the boundaries of technology to make transformative experiences possible for government, business, society and for every person on Earth — by harnessing the capability of the cloud, the ubiquity of the internet of things, the latest advances in memory and programmable solutions, and the promise of always-on 5G connectivity.
In addition, real-world applications of AI-powered by Intel are solving complex problems, making processes more efficient and creating new realities. For example, the company collaborated with the Energy Department and the National Institutes of Health on an AI on high-performance computing project called CANDLE – an exascale deep learning and simulation that enabled precision medicine for cancer.
And in January 2015, Intel announced the Diversity in Technology initiative, setting a bold hiring and retention goal to achieve full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in Intel’s U.S. workforce by 2020. Intel achieved the goal in 2018.
As for personal career leadership, Valcich is an active member of the Homeland Security Defense Business Council and the Washington Homeland Security Roundtable. He’s also a member of the American Council for Technology – Industry Advisory Council and serves as a Voyagers Program mentor.
Why Watch:
Valcich’s focus for the remainder of 2019 is to continue education on the benefits of emerging technologies and working with the federal partner and contracting ecosystem on engaging the government to evaluate, deploy and realize technology business value.
He plans to share industry best practices on several digital transformation topics and focus on collaborating with the government to implement hybrid multi-cloud architecture and realize the value of AI and data science.
