William McCormick
Mile Corrigan, senior vice president and corporate officer for Noblis, took part in her first Executive Spotlight interview detailing the recent launch of RunGrantsTM and the company’s effort to centralize its customers’ cloud capabilities.
In addition, Corrigan also spoke with ExecutiveBiz about the current conversation surrounding aviation autonomy in the aerospace market, Noblis’ IT modernization efforts and the key factors to drive customer satisfaction and engagement in the federal sector.
“I can tell you that customer experience is the top priority at Noblis. This begins with our organizational structure. We intentionally organized our internal structure around our customers’ and their missions as our goal is to understand every facet of the agencies we support, and ultimately, combine our deep mission knowledge with our extensive research and unique strategic and technical expertise.”
You can read the full Executive Spotlight with Mile Corrigan below:
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on the launch of RunGrantsTM! What can you tell us about the program’s capabilities, along with RunAcquisitionsTM, to improve clients’ decision-making and centralize cloud capabilities for your customers as well as offer a model for other federal agencies’ IT modernization efforts in the future?
“We’re excited about the launch of RunGrants. It’s custom-built to accelerate the grants management lifecycle. It collects and simplifies thousands of applications to provide a customizable low-code, workflow-based system that delivers powerful evaluation analytics that helps reviewers quickly show the priority and value for every grant.
The solution is also inherently tailored to manage federal processes and built in a secure cloud-based environment on a FedRAMP-compliant, gov cloud platform that leverages data analytics.
We also launched RunAcquisitions to help validate decisions and prepare federal agencies to share and easily defend outcomes as budgets face heavy scrutiny. Because the platform streamlines multiple workflows into one common platform within a mature compliance system, it acts as a ‘one-stop-shop,’ so agencies don’t have to worry about whether they’re meeting evolving requirements—the solution is built for federal business and updates automatically.
It also automates processes to expedite results and has role-based access, controls and workflows to meet project needs while abiding by the agency- or department-level Zero-Trust security requirements.
It’s early in the launch and we’re already preparing to implement the solution for a new customer in the defense space. We’re confident that accelerating their grants life cycle and using a platform that enables better decisions faster and is built for the federal government will significantly improve the overall experience for their agency and grantees alike.
Noblis has been providing this expertise for decades. Offering it as a service is just another way we can modernize and optimize the overall experience for the federal government.”
ExecutiveBiz: How would you describe the conversation that’s happening around aviation autonomy and the development of standards in the aerospace market? How is Noblis working to develop the most impactful engineering solutions to address the unique challenges of enterprise-level systems today?
“In the aviation industry, we’re moving rapidly towards autonomous aviation operations. However, the current mechanisms associated with airworthiness and operational approval aren’t oriented for autonomous systems to have the authority and responsibilities that have been traditionally assigned to humans.
As a whole, the industry’s made significant progress on the technology. Several innovative companies, including both traditional aviation companies and startups that are new to the aviation market, are catching up to the technological innovation standards while other developing organizations have various autonomous initiatives underway.
Operational activities that are traditionally regulated by flight standards organizations will inevitably be reached in various systems, so system certification has been the responsibility of the aircraft certification organization. In the sector, operational procedures and airspace integration challenges for self-piloted aircrafts are also further behind.
Noblis participates in various standards organizations, including the RTCA as one of the core standard organizations. We have also developed an information integrity framework as well as an initial approach for ensuring trustworthy data that will be used by distributed automation systems, both in the air and on the ground, to help make operational decisions.
A key element to trustworthy autonomy is trustworthy data—which drives the autonomy. To date, nobody has developed an orchestrated autonomy framework—a critical component for reaching significant advancements in this arena.
However, this is a key research project for Noblis. As part of our company-sponsored program, we’ve done significant research around orchestrated and cooperative autonomy and will continue this initiative to raise the bar and help drive a clear, tangible path forward for our clients.”
Visit our Executive Spotlight Page on ExecutiveBiz.com to learn more about the most significant leaders of consequence to the government contracting (GovCon) and federal sectors and their experiences driving growth, new business and capabilities in the fiercely competitive federal landscape.
ExecutiveBiz: In terms of improving the federal government’s “speed of innovation” and operations, what are the most significant hurdles that Noblis is working to address in the IT and infrastructure modernization efforts for other agencies? How has the process of delivering digital solutions changed for Noblis as well?
“Noblis has been partnering with the government on large-scale technology transformation for decades. This includes helping the government transition from time-division multiplexing to IP communications for large-scale networks or adopting cloud computing to digital and mobile technology and more.
In terms of digital solutions, interestingly enough, where we’re seeing the biggest uptick in demand is on the architecture front. We’re seeing a huge demand from our customers in digital engineering solutions and model-based systems engineering (MBSE).
As a result, the move from paper-based architectures to digital engineering is a big deal because of the cost savings involved from enterprise architecture solutions to MBSE, where we saw agencies like NASA and the Department of Defense progress from paper-based to digital models.
Pulling on that thread, data-centric digital engineering methods are also needed to help align their infrastructures, frameworks and prototypes with coherent and consistent models, which has been a connected effort.
This conversation really extends to autonomous and adaptive systems and shows that classic systems engineering methods are no longer going to be enough primarily due to cost and increasing complexity. These methods also broaden the trade space and allow for low-cost what-if analysis and alternatives assessment.
In addition, as we start to think about testing, we’re going to have to consider non-traditional approaches to be able to take more decomposed models and test them in an evolutionary way. Those models must be visual in nature—integrating people, process, tools and data, which is driving the need for digital solutions for both the architecture and the design. Specifically, we’re spending a lot of time—and seeing a lot of investment from customers—moving up the curve and the stack to be on the design architecture side as well as the end solution.
To help with this, we’ve made significant investments in training, tools and research. One of the advantages of being a nonprofit—in addition to being technology-agnostic—is the unique ability to reinvest profits in our people, tools and research. This benefits our customers, employees, company—and the industry as a whole.
In addition to these primary focus areas, we’re also working to develop smart product integrations that meet the speed, scale and mission requirements at both the agency and enterprise level. Ultimately, Noblis’ objective is for our customers to feel like they hit the ‘easy’ button when working with us.
ExecutiveBiz: What are some of the less recognized factors to drive customer satisfaction and engagement in the federal sector that a lot of companies don’t focus on enough? What are some of the lesser-known challenges in business development to drive growth and innovation?
“I can tell you that customer experience is the top priority at Noblis. This begins with our organizational structure. We intentionally organized our internal structure around our customers’ and their missions as our goal is to understand every facet of the agencies we support—and ultimately, combine our deep mission knowledge with our extensive research and unique strategic and technical expertise.
To that end, another key area in driving growth and innovation for Noblis is our unique commitment and capabilities around research. Our Noblis Sponsored Research program is an essential part of life at Noblis. It helps spark new ideas and enables our teams to develop and test new models that help solve critical problems now and for the future.
This program also fosters a collaborative and inventive environment for our employees. This, in turn, helps us not only employ some of the brightest and most innovative minds in our industry but also helps develop strong partnerships with our customers.
Simply put, for Noblis, it’s not about meeting milestones, but about continuously pushing the boundaries of innovation to help our customers advance their missions and prepare for what’s next.”
