Steve Tolbertexecutive vice president of business systems at CACI Internationalrecently spoke GovCon Wire about the company’s position in the federal market to assist our government agencies in implementing the latest technology and modernizing their business systems.
In addition, Tolbert discussed the changes government agencies are making to improve their procurement strategies as well as accelerating federal market demands to stay ahead of the technological curve during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“The scope of the work we do is vast-for example, almost all of the Department of Defense’s annual budget requires CACI-supported usage systems, we process nearly half a trillion dollars annually in payments to government contractors , and we’re building the world’s largest PeopleSoft Human Capital Management system for the U.S. Army. “
You can read the full Executive Spotlight interview with Steve Tolbert below:
GovCon Wire: What is the role of CACI in relation to implementing and modernizing business systems for the federal government?
Steve Tolbert: “CACI provides solutions to U.S. Government agencies for a range of key business areas such as Human Capital Management, Financial Management, Budget Management, and Acquisition Solutions.
We provide these Business System solutions through a range of full life-cycle services from design, development, and deployment through maintenance and retirement. We also leverage our leading capabilities in areas such as Agile/DevSecOps, data analytics, intelligent automation, cloud, and ERP to scale. With these solutions, we help accelerate digital transformation across government.
The work we do is vast-for example, almost every annual budget of the Department of Defense requires CACI-supported utilization systems, we process nearly half a trillion dollars annually in payments to government contractors, and build we have the largest PeopleSoft Human Capital management system in the world for the US Army.
Finally, we are doing this work on a scale in all sectors of government including the Defense, Intelligence, and Federal Civilian agencies. The outcomes of our work for the agencies we support include accelerated decision support, sequential clean financial audits, the ability to respond more quickly to changing government workers, more secure systems and data, and higher overall productivity. “
GovCon Wire: What changes do you see in this market and how has CACI met the rapidly changing demand? Do you see an increase or acceleration due to pandemics or geopolitical issues?
Steve Tolbert: “Dubin of combining an unprecedented number of national and global issues over the past 24 months, we see significant growth in the need for rapidly changing government IT capabilities with more modern, flexible, safe, and scalable architectures.
This is specifically the extent of business innovation and associated functionality needed to support our customers ’growing expectations, and the urgency with which it needs to happen. We have reached the point of change where the continued reliance on legacy ‘systems of systems’ poses a threat to the government’s ability to govern, protect, and serve our country.
Among the issues I refer to here are fast -moving and potentially existing threats such as global pandemics, geopolitical unrest, climate change, and social and political unrest, to name a few.
The effects of these issues on our industry are immense-rapidly changing requirements and policies, increased cybersecurity threats, need for faster decision support in growing data stores, rapid scaling of processing power, greater competition for funding, and higher expectations for audibility, and more. This has real implications for the work we do and CACI is responding.
Our solutions are increasingly adaptable, meaning we make solutions more flexible, modular, and composable, enabling our clients to adapt more quickly to changing circumstances and needs.
As an example, where relevant, we use our advanced Agile and DevSecOps techniques to allow configuration and configuration solutions that more quickly adapt to changing needs during and even after deployment.
We work closely with our clients to evaluate and optimize in near real-time the trade-offs between the required changes and the resulting schedule, technical, and cost risks, giving our clients the deployed solutions that more closely match current business needs.
We also see the need for solutions that can grow rapidly as demand rises and falls faster (e.g., pandemic demand changes in CDC’s business systems for data collection and analysis). We do this through increased virtualization (think: hyper scalable cloud architectures) and AI that can predict and automatically adjust processing resources to meet changes in demand.
Government agencies need to respond to the ever -changing cyber threats – solutions must implement “appropriate security”, where it is only expected that threats will develop faster and to a greater extent and. more diverse areas on the surface-systems should be able to autonomously identify, interrupt, and recover from cyber threats in near-real-time. We use techniques such as DevSecOps, Zero Trust, and others to make solution defenses smarter and more robust.
The user base for government systems has become more diverse, with different levels of technical proficiency and different expectations for system interaction. Our solutions must be more intuitive, smarter, and more configured to meet this changing demand.
We’re also adding more intelligence to the solutions we provide, where more tasks are automated, and more systems are self-reacting to changes in variables such as cloud resource demand, cyberthreats, end-user needs , and business processes. Solutions are increasingly self -adaptable, self -protecting, and self -healing.
In other words, we need to keep innovating to respond to more change in less time. ”
GovCon Wire: How is technology changing the landscape of business systems in the federal market? Are government agencies changing their procurement strategies to reflect these changes?
Steve Tolbert: “As I described, business demands on our government clients are changing rapidly, and as a result, so are the underlying technologies and procurement strategies they expect. In response to these and other changes, CACI is advancing our capabilities using essential technologies.
For example, CACI’s Agile Solution Factory (ASF) optimizes Agile software development, delivering the benefits of Agile on an enterprise scale. CACI’s ASF results in large government programs include increased end-user satisfaction through higher quality and more secure software deployed in shorter release phases-and with more transparency.
CACI also provides some of the most advanced cloud migration and optimization capabilities in the industry. We use industry-leading Agile approaches to quickly design and deploy modular cloud solutions that reduce complexity, cost, and risk while ensuring security and interoperability.
We protect cloud-hosted infrastructure, protect critical data, identify and mitigate emerging threats, and deliver innovative IaaS, DevSecOps, machine learning, and big data solutions that are truly transforming IT environments. government.
In addition, CACI delivers advanced analytics capabilities, applied artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) expertise and technology to accelerate productivity and decision making.
Our capabilities quickly analyze and translate data into decisions that increase worker efficiency, respond automatically, and use human-in-the-loop technologies to enhance adaptable AI models for business. We improve the quality and speed of decisions.
We also use low-code advances, no code environments like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Appian, and more to streamline business processes in less time and in a way that end-users can adapt. Not only are we seeing changes in cost of ownership, we’ve found that this approach also provides power for end-users who need some flexibility without the need for more expensive development.
The procurement changes we see in some agencies include more risk sharing with contractors (e.g., more use of Firm Fixed Price and other outcome-based models), some degree of contract aggregation to reduce contract management and integration requirements, and increase emphasis on collaboration between developers and operators of systems to drive better software faster.
This move to outcome-based models allows contractors like CACI to bring more of these technologies to support their customers ’missions.”
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