Andy Reed
There is a method to the madness of preparing for future foes and threatening scenarios; when climbing a hill that appears insurmountable, the best way up is to keep climbing. In the intelligence community, industry leaders are utilizing all available resources to decrease costs and increase productivity, working in collaboration to find new solutions to old problems. For example, when SRA merged with CSGov to form CSRA, the two companies brought their policies together to reinforce their already strong strategies in a cohesive manner. Someone who has been around since the SRA-switch is CSRA’s current Director of Operations Jim Visich. Jim gave a few a moments of his time to ExecutiveBiz for this exclusive look at innovation, and perhaps how others in the industry should take note.
“Continuous improvement never stops. As organizations change, so does the need to look for ways of refining our business and delivery processes.”
EM: You’ve been at CSRA since 2012, rising through the ranks in a number of positions. How have your responsibilities changed since you first joined? Can you describe your current responsibilities?
Jim Visich: I joined CSRA’s legacy company, SRA International, after spending 27 years at Lockheed Martin in a number of different positions, including business operations and program management. At SRA, I served as Vice President of Program Management & Execution Quality, overseeing the execution of our program portfolio and the development of our program managers. When SRA merged with CSGov to form CSRA, I helped the new organization develop policies and procedures relating to program execution. Combining two new companies can present different challenges, but we were able to succeed by utilizing a set of best practices and tools from each organization and used them to develop a new concept of operations. In my current role as CSRA’s Intel Operations Director, I oversee our intel portfolio’s program performance. My main focus is ensuring that CSRA meets all program requirements and deliverables by utilizing the lessons I learned from supporting the intelligence community over the last 30 years.
You are a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. How do you apply what you learned in this process to your everyday?
Continuous improvement never stops. As organizations change, so does the need to look for ways of refining our business and delivery processes. This self-reflecting enables CSRA to deliver on our customer commitments as efficiently as possible. However this is still not enough in today’s market. Finding solutions to old problems only gets you up to speed, we also need to look for new ways to innovate. At CSRA, we are doing so by “Thinking Next. Now.†Improvement focuses on what you have; innovation imagines what could be and makes it possible.
Collecting and analyzing data is important to producing good military intellegience. With the exponential growth in data, what technologies are you watching that will help your clients improve their data management?
One of our primary objectives is preparing the infrastructure that will stage and hold data, as well as the technologies to analyze and present it. Whether it’s an elastic cloud, an on-premise hyper-converged infrastructure solution (or a hybrid approach of both) CSRA is focused on the best ways to satisfy our clients’ needs. This requires preparing, securing, optimizing, and managing virtual platforms for larger and larger quantities of data. For analyzing the data, we use big data analytics, data science, business intelligence, warehousing, and enterprise information management techniques.
In early November CSRA launched the Cyber Center of Excellence. How do you see the new center benefiting CSRA customers? –
CSRA’s Cyber Center of Excellence is a valuable resource for our customers. It serves as a central location (both physical and virtual) to support our customers in the face of ever-evolving threat scenarios. CSRA believes that rapid innovation can make the difference between success and failure. By offering our customers access to the latest cyber technologies, we can accelerate innovation and engineer the best technology solutions for their environments.
In your opinion, how can the government manage shared services, and what impact do you see shared services having on the intel community?
Optimizing shared services in the intelligence community is a complicated matter. There is the obvious need to share information, but at the same time, protect and govern it in accordance with the law and the customer’s policies. CSRA is an industry leader in shared services – an important solution that many government agencies are utilizing to decrease costs and increase productivity. We are continuing to find new ways to offer this resource to the intelligence community where our customers’ needs and adhering to their policies can come together in a synergistic way.
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Jim Visich previously worked at Lockheed Martin (2002-2012) holding positions as Program Manager and Project Engineer Principal. He is a graduate of Penn State and holds a Master’s in Information Sciences, also founding the Save a Heart Beach Ride benefit event.
