3. CONTENTS
26
Science Non-Fiction
The future of invisible laser beams
BY JACOB KRISS
30
Open Performance
Leaders from Booz Allen Digital
discuss their latest book
BY ALEX HAEDERLE
34
Functional Growth
Why Booz Allen is investing in
new capabilities
BY SUSAN PENFIELD
BOOZ ALLEN STARTS
WITH CHARACTERS
38
“If you see yourself in these characters
and you want to leave an imprint on
the world, then join us.”
BY AIMEE GEORGE LEARY
40
The Management Consultant
Booz Allen’s original profession has transformed
44
The Cloud Architect
Seeing digital as it could be
48
The Data Scientist
Daring to transform society
50
The Intelligence Analyst
Predictive detective and proactive
entrepreneur
54
The Interns
A chance to do something that matters
56
The Creative
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
60
The Talent Agent
Answering Why Booz Allen?
64
The Engineers
Prototyping a better, safer,
more exciting world
68
The Developer
Shipping code and culture in parallel scripts
72
The Security Professional
Software engineers who think like
the bad guys
76
The Product Manager
The new ringleader
80
The Systems Integrator
Next-generation technology management
MARKE T A PPL IED INNOVAT ION
06
Answers on Demand
Meet Sailfish. Booz Allen’s new
data science platform
B Y C O N N O R J . H O G A N
08
Crowdsourcing Great Ideas
A nationwide hunt for brilliance
B Y A L E X H A E D E R L E
14
At the Corner of 15th and I(deas)
A new space to connect with a city
in transition
B Y T O B Y U L M A N D C O N N O R J . H O G A N
18
Out of the Shadows
This elite cyber team hacks the
most opaque industry challenges
B Y J A C O B K R I S S
INNOVAT ION PHILOSOPHY
20
Beating the Drum of Discovery
The technological need for more
women in STEM
B Y G R E T C H E N M C C L A I N
84
The Executive
Because leadership requires perspective
INNOVATION EDUCATION
90
Present Like You’re Einstein
Tips to wow your clients
BY KARAM SINGH SETHI
92
How to Get 90% of Your Interns
to Work for You
This new model is transforming
the business of internships
BY BRENNA THORPE
EXTERNAL PERSPECTIVE
96
The Culture of Software
How SPARC is rebooting the culture
of software delivery
BY AMANDA STRUNGS
98
A Dockerized Government
This tiny startup is on a mission
to upgrade government IT
BY CHRIS CYRUS,
DIRECTOR OF ENTERPRISE SALES AT DOCKER
4 | Contents > ENVOI Articles | 5Contents > ENVOI Articles
4. 6 | | 7ANSWERS ON DEMAND Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
In September 1994, Cambridge Cable, a
boutique British cable company, piloted
a service that beamed video
directly into their custom-
ers’ homes for a nominal fee.
Dubbed “Video On Demand,”
the format disrupted the British
entertainment industry. The
service allowed subscribers
to watch Hollywood blockbust-
ers from their rural English
living rooms whenever they
wanted. It removed the need to tune in
at pre-defined times to watch particular
programming.
ON-DEMAND IN DEMAND
Fast-forward, and Cambridge Cable was
acquired in 1999 by what is now Virgin
Media to extend its coverage across southeast
England. Now almost everything is "on
demand," no longer just content or enter-
tainment. “This emergence has disrupted
every industry,” says Booz Allen Principal
Eric Druker. “Taxi cabs by Uber, retail by
Amazon. Companies that have not evolved
have fallen behind or faded away.”
For consumers, the question is no longer "if
or when?" but "how long?" Most impulses can
now be satisfied through a swipe or tap of
an app and with limited expertise. A non-
technical, on-demand capability, however,
doesn’t exist for organizations that want to
locate their data sets and draw insights from
them. They’re forced to rely on expensive
teams of highly technical people.
In response, Booz Allen built a dynamic family
of data science tools, integrated social plat-
forms, and on-demand service called Sailfish.
EXPLORE DATA. EXCHANGE INSIGHTS.
“Sailfish Explore makes it easier for you to get
value from your data immediately,” says prod-
uct lead Seth Clark. It opens up the biggest
data sets to executives and analysts alike so
they can get the answers they need quickly.
What’s more, people don’t need to know how
to code to use it. With drag and drop tools
and unfettered access to every data set in an
organization, anyone can build complex queries in
seconds by asking questions of data in plain English.
Sailfish Exchange, meanwhile, is a social
platform that adopts a Pinterest-like interface
to curate data sets across an organization.“It
turns data analytics into a team sport, making
it easier for people to work together and collab-
oratively solve tough problems,” explains Seth.
The product was developed to help people
understand they shouldn’t over-rely on their
own personal experience when making deci-
sions. That’s why Sailfish Exchange connects
decision makers to other people and their
insights, as well as the raw data.
AN EXTRA BOOST
When a user is stuck on a particularly tricky
problem that their team can’t collaboratively solve,
they can turn to Answers on Demand, which
instantly connects them to a team of Booz Allen
data scientists. Sailfish isn’t simply a platform
to find, share, and analyze data on demand; it’s
a portal to a 600-strong team who, some argue,
wrote the book on data science.
“We not only want to give clients a great tool that’s
fun and easy to use,” Seth says, “but provide access
to a team who can guide them through new ways
to think about their problems.”
It’s a human touch to data science that many over-
look. Yet, both Eric and Seth cite human intuition
as the most essential component to solving analyt-
ics problem. With Sailfish, the only limit to that
intuition is the amount of available data.
“Sailfish created the ability to crowdsource analytics
solutions within organizations and among hundreds
of data scientists, on demand,” says Eric. “It’s
going to transform the way we deliver consulting
and future-proof Booz Allen for the emerging on-
demand economy.”
“We not only want to give clients a great tool
that’s fun and easy to use, but provide access to
a team of data scientists who can guide them
through new ways to think about their problems.”
—SE TH CL ARK
PRODUCT LE AD
www.boozallen.com/sailfish
Watch how the Sailfish family is
solving the three main challenges
of the data-driven marketplace.
5. 1 | ARTICLE TITLE
THE COMBUSTION CHAMBER
Hosted semi-annually, the Combustion Chamber
is Booz Allen’s premier crowdsourced pitch
event. It’s a Shark Tank-style competition where
Booz Allen entrepreneurs seek executive-level
mentorship and investment funding for original
market-ready ideas and solutions.
SEATTLE COMBUSTION
CHAMBER, BY THE NUMBERS
++ 15 total finalists
++ 10 participating teams
++ 56 applications
++ 5 Booz Allen executive judges
++ 1 guest judge from Microsoft
THE ROAD TO SEATTLE
Paul Anderson and Michael Wilson
Dahlgren, VA: 2,343 miles
Kevin Lawson and Kevin Komiensky
Dahlgren, VA: 2,343 miles
Susan Farley
Arlington, VA: 2,320 miles
Paul D’Angio and Justin Manzo
Arlington, VA: 2,320 miles
Renish Nishku
McLean, VA: 2,316 miles
Sandra Marshall
McLean, VA: 2,316 miles
Dan Lyman
Rockville, MD: 2,312 miles
Scott Stables
Chicago, IL: 1,735 miles
Brad Pilsl and Alan Kolackovsky
San Diego, CA: 1,065 miles
Ian Byrnes and Eric Jones
Seattle, WA: 19,008 feet
For our latest installment, we traveled to Seattle, WA,
where energy, aerospace, and maritime industries drive
the regional economy. With a focus on Directed Energy,
Unmanned Autonomous Systems, Virtual Reality, and
Systems Delivery problems, our people unveiled transfor-
mative solutions over the course of one night.
A NIGHT AT STARTUP HALL
The Seattle Combustion Chamber took place at Startup Hall,
a co-working space at the University of Washington’s campus.
An open, collaborative space for students to develop their
ideas, it was an ideal backdrop for Booz Allen’s brightest
scientists, technologists, engineers, and consultants to
descend on the Emerald City and pitch their solutions.
Since its inception, the Combustion Chamber has featured
an application process in which staff from across the firm
submit their ideas. The best are selected as finalists, and
then our internal pitch coaches and mentors work with them
to prepare for the Combustion Chamber.
When we say good ideas come from everywhere, we mean it.
A record 56 applications were submitted in advance of the
Seattle Combustion Chamber. Only ten teams made the final
and were flown in from all across the country—from San
Diego, CA, to Chicago, IL, to Washington, D.C.—to compete
at Startup Hall.
TOTAL COMBUSTION
CHAMBER RESULTS
++ $510,000 in investment
funding awarded
++ 35 finalists
++ 5 locations
GOOD IDEAS COME FROM EVERY WHERE.
Yet it takes passion, research, exploration, and plenty of
tinkering to transform a hunch into an original idea with
business value. Smart companies create cultural processes
that harness the power of their ideas to propel a sustain-
able pipeline of fresh, creative business ideas. The biggest
challenge companies face lies in finding ways to discover
and cultivate brilliant ideas from their people, irrespective
of administrative levels or functional roles.
One of the ways Booz Allen has tackled this challenge is
by creating the Combustion Chamber. It’s Booz Allen’s
premier crowdsourced pitch event where consultants com-
pete against scientists, and technologists rival engineers to
secure mentoring and investment funding for their mar-
ket-ready business or product solutions.
Semi-annually, the Combustion Chamber is hosted in a
different city. The inaugural event began in Washington, D.C.,
at a local startup accelerator and seed fund. The second
installment journeyed across the country to the tech hub of
Los Angeles, CA, followed six months later by Boston, MA—
innovation capital of New England.
After the Boston event, however, analysis showed the
Combustion Chamber’s true value extended further than
sourcing great ideas and engaging regional staff beyond
the Capital Beltway. We could focus
our people and ideas on specific
business challenges based in parti
cular regions. So we held the fourth
Combustion Chamber in Atlanta,
GA. With the backdrop of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) and largest health community
in America, we directed our scientists
and Internet of Things technology
experts to improve safety of infec-
tious disease labs and reduce rapid
response events in hospitals.
| 9Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
COMBUSTION
CHAMBER
CROWDSOURCING GREAT IDEAS
By Alex Haederle
6. SEATTLE COMBUSTION
CHAMBER JUDGES
TONY MITCHELL
Navy Marine Corps CSO
MICHAEL FARBER
Ventures and Alliances Lead
BRIAN ABBE
Engineering Services Lead
MARK JACOBSOHN
NextGen Analytics Lead
MICKIE BOLDUC
Defense and Intelligence Group
Systems Delivery Lead
TOM KEANE
Partner Director Program Manager,
Microsoft
THE RIGHT
CONNECTIONS
Competitions need judges.
And business ideas need
leaders to sponsor them, implement them, and connect them to the people and
problems where they can have the most impact. Combustion Chamber judges
are executives from Booz Allen and our alliance partners, with the abilities to
mentor and invest in good ideas.
With the focus on energy, aerospace, and maritime solutions for the Seattle
Combustion Chamber, the judging panel included executives who lead techni-
cal businesses within markets that rely on advanced technology. From the
Client Service Officer (CSO) of our Navy and Marine Corps business, which
relies on maritime technology to keep our warfighters modernized and ahead
of foreign threats, to the lead of our Ventures and Alliances program that focuses
on emerging edge technologies, the judges comprised a broad range of Booz
Allen’s business.
What’s more, this year, we invited Tom Keane, Partner Director Program
Manager at Microsoft, to serve as a guest judge. Given the proximity to nearby
Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, and the event’s focus on technology-
driven solutions, Tom made the perfect addition to our panel of executive leaders.
“Trust and transparent relationships are extremely important,” Tom commented
minutes before the Combustion Chamber kicked off. “It’s a diverse world in which
we’re living, and the only way we can serve the needs of evolving customers is with
partners like Booz Allen.”
UNDER THE SEA AND UP IN THE AIR
“I mapped the bottom of the ocean, and mapped it in 3-D
layers,” Associate Ian Byrnes explained to a room of 100
intent listeners. Ian and teammate Lead Associate Eric Jones,
representing Booz Allen’s local Seattle staff at the event,
pitched their revolutionary Project MARLIN. Through
Oculus Rift-enabled virtual and augmented reality, Project
MARLIN creates what is essentially Google Earth for the
bottom of the ocean, with applications for the military, oil
and gas, and energy markets. The judges pressed on
their go-to-market strategy, client feedback, and proprietary
viability of their solution.
Ian and Eric set the tone
for the rest of the event.
Over the next two hours,
the crowd heard solutions
that soared from the ocean
floor to the skies. Brad Pilsl and Alan Kolackovsky
presented an integrated engineering solution
that outfits a special high-speed unmanned
surface vehicle with Booz Allen products—a 4G
LTE location solution and micro high-definition
digital video recorder—to improve intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.
Two groups from Dahlgren, VA, presented ideas
for common controls architecture and interface
protocols, as well as a new way to increase power
density, for directed energy systems.
Susan Farley, a technologist from Crystal City, VA,
presented her custom algorithm to help airlines
optimize their flight schedules for unexpected
delays. Sandy Marshall, a creative director from
McLean, VA, presented a solution that utilizes
Microsoft’s immersive HoloLens headset technol-
ogy to train air traffic controllers through spatial
visualization.
The biggest crowd-pleaser, however, involved
some tried-and-true aerial theatrics.
“I’m not trying to catch a 600-foot Space Needle in
the face,” Lead Engineer Paul D’Angio proclaimed,
met immediately with laughter from the audience
as he framed the danger that first responder rescue
teams face during natural disasters like earthquakes.
Amid the laughter, Senior Lead Engineer
Justin Manzo unpacked the team’s custom-built
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) prototype and
set it on the floor. Paul then grabbed a remote
control and flew the drone in front of the wide-eyed
audience and judge panel. By the time it landed
the teammates had demonstrated an autonomous
UAV solution to detect human lives faster and safer.
A CENTURY-OLD STARTUP
Consultant Renis Nishku delivered the night’s
most memorable pitch. He calmly walked
out to an eager 100-person crowd. Ten feet away
sat Booz Allen CEO Horacio Rozanski, who
watched with a stoic curiosity. The casual
observer wouldn’t know it, but at that moment
one of Booz Allen’s most junior staff members—
six months removed from graduating from
the University of South Florida with a B.S. in
Industrial Engineering—was about to ask for
$25,000 of Booz Allen’s investment funds, in
front of Booz Allen’s most senior executive.
Renis began his pitch with confidence. He described
his solution to use the Microsoft HoloLens to
create an Iron Man-like virtual environment for
engineers and mechanics to analyze defects in
manufacturing processes. By the time he ended
and the judges finished their questions, the crowd
applauded for the youngest finalist in the history
of the Combustion Chamber.
Thirty minutes later, Renis
received $25,000 from the
executive judging panel
and mentorship from Booz
Allen’s Strategic Ventures
Principal Rob Ruyak.
This is who we are. We
create avenues to put our
people front and center
and facilitate the collision
of brilliant ideas. Because
good ideas come from
everywhere.
MICROSOFT
HOLOLENS
Microsoft HoloLens
is a cordless, self-
contained Windows 10
computer packed into
a smart glasses virtual
reality headset. It uses
advanced sensors,
a high-definition
3-D optical display,
and spatial sound to
allow users to direct
augmented reality
applications with their
eyes, voice, and hand
motions. Microsoft
expects HoloLens to
begin shipping in the
first quarter of 2016.
10 | | 11COMBUSTION CHAMBER Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
7. WASHINGTON, D.C.
1776
The first Combustion Chamber took
place in Washington, D.C., at a local
startup incubator and seed fund. Five
teams pitched their best ideas for fund-
ing, and over the course of the event,
$50,000 was awarded among the
five finalists.
FINALISTS
Jerry Negrelli and Jinnyn Jacob, mobile
app to better connect dispersed work teams
James Bridgers, feature detection algorithm
to identify potholes in city streets
Bill Hargenrader, cybersecurity tool enabling bet-
ter monitoring and workflow tracking
Dan Liebermann and Doug Friedman, population
estimation and forecasting tool
Rachel Winchester, Allie Carroll, and Josh Chao,
integrated rewards platform
SANTA MONICA, CA
CROSS CAMPUS
The Cross Campus is the tech hub
of L.A.’s startup community, an
18,000-square-foot co-working and
office space housed in a renovated in-
dustrial building. Booz Allen hosted the
second Combustion Chamber there,
and over the course of the day, $55,000
was awarded among the five finalists.
FINALISTS
Dusty Vacak and Bill Bland, dynamic system
model that helps clients manage their Windows
Communication Foundations
Josh Wentlandt, command-and-control center to
expedite the distribution of flight keys to pilots
Joseph Wyrwas and Derek Aucoin, modified
Booz Allen-designed data security tools for
commercial government clients
Reechik Chatterjee, mobile application that
allows teams to share HIPAA-compliant medical
data in real-time
Mike Morgan, video intelligence solution
for U.S. Navy networks
BOSTON, MA
DISTRICT HALL
The third Combustion Chamber took
place in District Hall, a civic workspace
in Boston’s Seaport Innovation District
operated by startup accelerator and
strategic partner Cambridge Innovation
Center. The evening’s winning solutions
included a pathogen-sequencing data-
base to control early disease outbreaks,
to an adaptive problem-resolution mobile
app that helps DoD hardware and soft-
ware engineers troubleshoot. A total of
$120,000 was awarded to four winning
finalist teams.
FINALISTS
Michelle Holko, solution that enables scientists
to readily track and predict pathogen threats to
human health in real-time
Andrew Troy and Luke Warnock, crowdsourced tool
that shares real-time feedback among software
users and equipment managers
Sarah Olsen and Scott Welker, web application
that helps risk assessment analysts automate
data organization
Balaji Yelchuru and Ismail Zohdy, mobile tool that
forecasts future travel metrics and anticipated
resource expenditures
Brian Thomas, tool to provide specific risk mitiga-
tion recommendations to anti-terror officers in
the field
Daniel Shor and Kevin Weinstein, reusable engi-
neering framework for Booz Allen’s Engineering
Services team
ATLANTA, GA
GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Booz Allen chose Atlanta, home of the
CDC, to host the fourth Combustion
Chamber, which for the first time
narrowed the event’s focus to specific
market problems. Solutions focused
on Internet of Things-enabled health
solutions that sought to improve safety
of infectious disease labs and reduce
rapid response events in hospitals
through improved patient monitoring.
Nine finalist teams received a total of
$130,000 in funding for their solutions.
FINALISTS
Christy Staats, solution to automate the monitor-
ing of lab equipment
Monica Elmore & Wing Kuang, hands-free proce-
dural risk mitigation and analysis solution
Mike Caputo & Ryan Buckland, solution to reduce
hospital readmissions
Brad Smith, web-based data collection platform
tracking adverse vaccine events
Catherine Ordun, intensive inventory of health
surveillance data
Taalib al’Salaam & Rebecca Brown, cost avoid-
ance model for chronic diseases
Rebecca Hutchins, tactical cloud-enabled device
to better track biometrics data
Dimitrios Koutsonanos, web crawler pulling
data to better determine causes of death
Nico Preston, front-line disease
awareness solution
1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0
STRESS-TESTED SOLUTIONS
12 | | 13COMBUSTION CHAMBER Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
8. AT THE
CORNER OF
By Toby Ulm & Connor Hogan
A SPLIT TICKET CITY
In 2013, Booz Allen began
its own transformation
when we started devel-
oping an Innovation
Blueprint: a series of
components and systems
to source, supply, and
mature our innovation
practices. In the last three
years, we’ve augmented
our traditional business
models. We’ve built dis-
ruptive technologies and
co-created others through our extensive network
of partners. And we’ve driven growth through a
relentless pursuit of original value and integrated
focus on our clients’ biggest challenges.
The cultural and technological acceleration of
the District reflects Booz Allen’s recent journey.
“D.C. is an emerging tech hub these days,” says
Senior Vice President Mark Jacobsohn. “And
we’re a part of that.”
It’s why Booz Allen built the DC Innovation Center
on the first floor of our downtown office. Beyond
the plans, products, strategies, and models, Booz
The buildings on K Street in Washington, D.C.,
are a lineup of usual suspects. Law firms, lob-
byists, and associations wrestle for executive
window space along the tree-lined thoroughfare
as commuters pick out company names etched
above cold glass entranceways.
Running parallel to K Street, less than a mile
south toward the Potomac River, sits a row of
giant museums on either side of the National
Mall. In April, these stone-clad vaults catch
excited eighth-grade children along with global
artifacts in endless Smithsonian labyrinths.
Outside, the Washington Monument—the
city’s enduring monolith to experienced ambi-
tion—launches skyward from a platform of
American flags.
At first glance, it’s business as usual in the
Federal City.
But cracks have emerged in the veneer of
Washington's old guard. More than 1,000
technology startups have squeezed their way
into the crowded buildings and regulated indus-
tries once dominated by a few big businesses.
Startups have shaken the business foundations
of the capital city with youthful ideas and a
lean mentality. Yes, Washington, D.C., has
transformed.
Allen needed a new space
to collaborate and connect
with a city in transition.
The 8,700-square-foot
space is only a few blocks
from the Veterans Affairs
and Treasury buildings,
as well as the offices of
startup accelerator 1776
and WeWork co-working
spaces. It’s a physical
embodiment of our inno-
vation agenda, designed to
connect the best technol-
ogy to the toughest problems in a split ticket city
of startups and government.
DESIGN(ED) THINKING
“We set out to design more than just a center, but a
place where we can show an original side of Booz
Allen. It’s how we’re evolving,” Mark notes with a
smile. “The exterior is flanked in glass, so you can
have a peek right from the street.”
Next time you’re downtown, hop off the Orange,
Blue, or Silver Lines at McPherson Square Metro
and head west one block along I Street toward
15th. About halfway up the block, look right and
you can’t miss it: a space engineered for talent to
connect, collaborate, and co-create with clients,
partners, and the city’s entrepreneurs.
DC INNOVATION CENTER: AT THE CORNER OF 15TH AND IDEAS
LOCATION: 901 15TH STREET, WASHINGTON, D.C.
SIZE: 8,700 SQ. FT.
MAIN SPONSORS: HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE,
INTEL, MICROSOFT
ARCHITECTURAL CREDENTIALS
THE DC INNOVATION CENTER ARCHITECTS ALSO DESIGNED
CAPITAL ONE LABS
EVENTS THAT INSPIRE
BOOZ ALLEN REGULARLY HOSTS EVENTS WITH OUR PARTNERS
FROM INDUSTRY, ACADEMIA, AND THE STARTUP COMMUNITY.
WHATIF: An annual event that hosts disruptive
thinkers from industry, government, academia,
and the community to ideate, interact, and of-
fer solutions to the world’s toughest problems
COMBUSTION CHAMBER: A competition
where employees pitch new products and
capabilities to a panel of Booz Allen leaders,
who evaluate the solutions and award funding,
mentorship, and client introductions
STARTUP WEEKEND: A 54-hour event, in
partnership with Techstars, where participants
develop their entrepreneurial skills to build
new value for their clients and business
“We set out to design
more than just a center,
but a place where we
can show an original
side of Booz Allen. It’s
how we’re evolving.”
—MARK JACOBSOHN
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT
14 | | 1515TH
& IDEAS Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
9. Inside the main fishbowl-feeling workspace, sporadic pockets
of small teams huddle around laptops and tables. A serendipi-
tous energy permeates the room where projects range from
connected vehicles, to new partnership discussions, to open
source software. There’s a sense that every team is just one
conversation away from associating the right concoction of
ideas to solve the problem they’re working on.
“We needed the right environment to get the best out of
our talent,” explains Executive Vice President and Chief
Administrative Officer Joe Mahaffee. Through its design, the
space can surge and scale with the needs of those working
inside it. In minutes, the multi-group workspaces can trans-
form into a unified community event space. As Joe notes,
“The Innovation Center’s open, adaptable space expresses our
century-old spirit of teamwork, collaboration, and entrepre-
neurialism in a way we’ve never done before."
INTERNET OF THINGS LAB
An assembled collection of hardware and soft-
ware capabilities from across Booz Allen
to solve the challenges of a connected age
PROJECT TEAM SPACE
A creative and open environment to enable
selected teams to design and implement new
products and services
“The Innovation Center’s open,
adaptable space expresses our
century-old spirit of teamwork,
collaboration, and entrepreneurialism
in a way we’ve never done before.”
—JOE MAHAFFEE
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
delivering it to a client as either a minimum viable product or
complete solution. If achieving that goal requires collaboration
with industry or startup partners, teams have license to seek
out the technology and expertise they need.
“A lot of problems that our clients face today cannot be solved
by a single company,” Joe says. “It takes a whole network of
inputs from multiple organizations who are willing to come
together in ways that were previously inconceivable. With the
Innovation Center, we’re brokering those relationships.”
Not every project and collaboration in the Innovation Center
will succeed. That’s okay. A century of pioneering has
taught us that taking sensible risks and failing forward is
what matters. That’s how we build new value for our clients,
our partners, and our people.
That’s business as usual for Booz Allen.
DON'T GO IT ALONE
The DC Innovation Center attracts people and organizations
from different disciplines and backgrounds to engage around
common problem sets. “We’re rethinking the way we do
partnerships,” Mark says. “Both big and small.”
In fact, it’s an alliance with three companies—Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, Intel, and Microsoft—that laid the
groundwork for the Center. With financial and equipment
support from these three sponsors, the Center offers talent
the chance to tinker with the latest technology and search
for ways to build value by connecting it to industry and
client problems.
Teams working in the Center focus on collaboration and pro-
totyping. Small groups rotate through the Center periodically
with the intent to incubate, test, and refine a model before
VENTURES AND EDGE TECHNOLOGIES ROOM
A dedicated space to forge new partnerships with
industry, academia, and the startup community to
find solutions to the world’s emerging problems
STAGE AND EVENT SPACE
Hosts community engagements, from startup
weekends to hackathons to executive panels
SPACES MATTER
EVERY AREA WITHIN THE DC INNOVATION CENTER SERVES A SPECIFIC PURPOSE
16 | | 1715TH
& IDEAS Applied Innovation > ENVOI Articles
10. OUT OF THE
SHADOWS
By Jacob Kriss
THE OBJECTIVE WAS SIMPLE:
FIND A WAY IN.
If you’re indoors and breathing, chances are
there’s a heating, ventilating, and air condition-
ing (HVAC) machine outside. HVAC units keep
buildings warm through the winter, cool in the
summer, and us breathing fresh oxygen year
round. The units are meant to provide comfort,
not to endanger us.
A couple of years ago, however, hackers exploited
a near invisible vulnerability in an HVAC system
to break into the internal networks of a major
retailer. Using infectious malware, they boosted
network credentials from the HVAC systems
vendor that kept the retailer’s building circulated
with air. With those credentials on file, they had
their way in—a license to steal, using nothing
but keystrokes and code.
Install malware to steal credentials. Exploit web
application vulnerability. Search relevant targets
for propagation. Steal access token. Create new
admin credentials. Propagate to relevant computers.
Install malware. Steal PII. Install malware.
Steal 40 million credit cards. Mission accomplished.
[0101] <G:blackhatgoal: accomplished>
Meet the 21st-century bank robber.
HACKERS ON THE HUNT
Devastating attacks like these are not unusual;
in fact, they’re increasingly routine and relentless.
Malicious hackers don’t operate like traditional
thieves. They rarely plan a heist with a single
entry point, rehearse it, and attempt to execute.
Instead, they poke, prod, and pry at every imagin-
able vulnerability in a system.
From dark corners, these criminals work in secret
to exploit any vulnerability, however small, in the
devices that connect us—from cellphones, to laptops,
to building sensors that monitor oxygen levels—in
an attempt to steal our data and disrupt our way
of life. You don’t know when or how they’ll attack.
Just that they will.
In response, Booz Allen assembled Dark Labs:
an elite group of vulnerability and malware analysts,
reverse engineers, and data sientists dedicated to
anticipating, outmaneuvering, outsmarting, and
preventing malicious hackers from breaking into
critical infrastructure and proprietary systems.
The Dark Labs team doesn’t simply respond to
individual cyber incidents or conduct network
penetration testing. They act as guardians, inves-
tigators, and curious, inquisitive problem solvers.
They’re trained and charged to sniff out patterns
of life in network data, code, and firmware that
would seem meaningless to an ordinary person.
“We’re not just thinking about the challenges of today,
but what’s going to strike 10 years from now,” says
Senior Associate and Dark Labs Deputy Director
Will Farrell.
GETTING THE GREEN LIGHT
Indeed, Dark Labs illuminates the critical vulner-
abilities in the things many of us see every day.
Last summer, for example, a Dark Labs team and
a cohort of interns reverse-engineered a traffic
light control system used throughout thousands
of cities and towns across America. The “Green
Light Project,” as it was called,
identified eight vulnerabili-
ties that, if exploited, would
create chaos on our nation’s
roads and highways.
The Dark Labs team coded
a software patch to fix the
traffic light control system
vulnerabilities, and then gave
it away for free to system
vendors and municipali-
ties —preemptively solving
a previously unknown
security issue.
That’s what Dark Labs strives for: seeing what
others can’t, and fixing it.
LIGHTING THE WAY
In the coming months, Booz Allen’s clients and
partners will be invited into Dark Labs. Together,
they’ll work with our experts to co-develop and
co-invest in new solutions that prevent attacks
before they happen.
“Our ultimate vision is not to be out there simply
triaging broken systems,” says Will. “Instead, we
want to partner with organizations during their
engineering and development cycle to secure
their systems from the very beginning.”
It’s about time cyber security got some fresh air.
“We have world class cyber talent at Booz Allen,”
says Vice President and Dark Labs Director Chad
Gray. “And we’re unleashing them—the best of
the best from the intelligence community—
against the most complex, growing problems
in commercial and international markets.”
ENGINEERED EXPERIMENTATION
Dark Labs is small by design. Inside nondescript
buildings across the country, several lean, agile
project teams of three to six people huddle in
open workspaces. Here, teams are given broad
autonomy to develop original security products
and solutions that cast light on the most opaque
challenges across industries.
“We empower our experts to work on what’s excit-
ing and challenging to them. We established a
cultural expectation for them to test hypotheses
and fail forward,” says Chad.
Dark Labs’ research and development focuses
on emerging cyber threats and technologies.
Particular attention is paid to enterprise and
industrial systems that protect critical infra-
structure, such as connected vehicles, financial
institutions, and oil and gas networks. The team
also focuses on finding and fixing vulnerabilities
in things like automation systems, medical
devices, and traffic control systems through
responsible disclosure.
The Dark Labs team regularly performs a variety
of network reconnaissance and rapid prototyping,
reverse-engineers apps, finds vulnerabilities, and
writes threat reports to stay ahead of hackers.
…malicious hackers don’t operate
like traditional thieves... they poke,
prod, and pry at every imaginable
vulnerability in a system.
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 1 0 2 2 0 1 1 0 0 0 X 0 1 0 0 0
0
11. From textiles to telescopes, light
bulbs to cell phones, and from
directed energy to virtual reality,
we can chart human history on a
trajectory of technological discovery.
We live in the most connected,
most technologically sophisticated
moment in history because of the
ingenuity of talented people.
People with science, technology, engineering, and mathe-
matics educations, or STEM as the fields are now collectively
called, power technological discovery in America. Yet, the
diversity among those advancing these disciplines is dwindling.
Today, technological advancements are mostly pioneered by
a narrow group of people: men.
My father drew me to science. He was an engineer, and he
spent time teaching my siblings and I to tear things apart,
and then rebuild them. Before we could get our drivers’
licenses, we had to know how to change out the brake pads
on a car. From a young age, I was encouraged to experiment,
embrace the unknown, and use math and technology to
solve problems.
Women, however, remain severely underrepresented in
STEM fields. Although they make up nearly half the American
workforce, women still represent just
under a quarter of the total STEM
workforce. Education systems struggle
to get women into technical fields
academically, and American industries
struggle to keep them long term. This
has created an unsustainable talent
gap that, if left unaddressed, will slow
the pace of technological discovery and
America’s economic progress.
We need more women in STEM.
A CULTURAL CALL
Booz Allen has been leading this effort
to close the talent gap and get more
women into STEM fields and leadership
positions. It is committed to encourag-
ing, empowering, and pulling women
through into senior management roles,
and has built mechanisms for those
advancements.
“We all think differently and bring something unique t0
the party,” Executive Vice President Susan Penfield says.
“To truly represent the global landscape though, we need
to start inside ourselves.”
Leader of Booz Allen’s Strategic Innovation Group, Susan
also co-chairs Booz Allen’s Women’s Agenda—a focused
approach to recruiting, developing, and advancing women
into senior leadership roles within the firm. Its mission is
A DISPARITY OF
WOMEN IN STEM
FIELDS
Women make up nearly half
the American workforce, yet
represent just under 25% of
the total STEM workforce.
—“Women in STEM: A Gender
Gap to Innovation.” U.S.
Department of Commerce,
Economics and Statistics
Administration.
Women in the information
security profession repre-
sent 10% of the workforce—
a percentage that is
unchanged from two years
ago. Although their sheer
numbers in this profession
are increasing, they are only
increasing at the pace of the
profession as a whole.
—“Women in Security: Wisely
Positioned for the Future of
InfoSec.” (ISC)².
First woman elected
as partner in Booz
Allen’s Worldwide
Technology
Business (WTB)
First woman
appointed as head
an office in Sao
Paolo, Brazil
First Women’s
Advisory
Board formed
First Workforce
Diversity Council
formed
Booz Allen Hamilton
named to Working
Mother magazine’s
“100 Best Compa-
nies for Working
Mothers”
First woman
elected as Senior
Partner
Booz Allen sponsors
the first Women of
Greater Washington
Diversity Forum
For the first time,
WTB promotes more
women than men
1988
1994
1995
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
CHARTINGACOURSE
OFSUCCESS
By Gretchen McClain
BEATING
THE DRUM
OF DISCOVERY
20 | | 21BEATING THE DRUM OF DISCOVERY Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
12. First firmwide
Senior African
American Women’s
Network formed,
and Board Diversity
Initiative launched
Booz Allen
executive named
first woman
Chairman of the
Principal
Development
Committee
First Women’s
Leadership
meeting held,
launching the
Women’s Leader-
ship Initiative
Relationship
established with
Women of Color
in Technology
Women 3.0 maga-
zine names Booz Al-
len executive to its
list of the Top 100
Women in Corporate
America
Relationship
established with
the Society of
Women Engineers
Relationship
established
with Women in
International
Security
Working Mother
magazine chooses
Booz Allen as one
of the Top 10 Best
Companies for
Working Mothers
for the fourth time
For the tenth
consecutive year,
Booz Allen Hamilton
named to Working
Mother magazine’s
list of 100 Best
Companies for
Working Mothers
2003
2004
2006
2005
2007
2008
to increase the representation of
talented women at all levels across
Booz Allen, enrich their opportunities,
and spread the intellect and thought
leadership that women bring to our
business, clients, and communities.
And it’s working. Commitment to the
Women’s Agenda has led to three women
members of the Board of Directors,
four leadership team members, as
well as the first woman appointed as
General Counsel in Booz Allen’s history.
The Women’s Agenda Leadership Excellence Program, a six-month
immersion program, helps develop Booz Allen’s top talent into
successful leaders. Events such as workshops on voice and presence
and political savvy, one-on-one coaching, peer groups, and leadership
events help our women connect and feel more engaged and supported.
The Women’s Agenda is bigger than STEM, although it does include it.
Externally, Booz Allen’s Women’s Agenda partners with organizations
such as the Society of Women Engineers, the Women’s Center, and
Women of Color in STEM to mentor and increase access for women
in technical fields.
“The vision for our Women’s Agenda,” Executive Vice President and Chief
Personnel Officer Betty Thompson shares, “is to ensure that all women
and all diverse populations at Booz Allen have a chance to move to the
next level, and to see women like them as role models in senior levels.”
AN UNCOMFORTABLE SEAT AT THE TABLE
American culture unquestionably influences why women veer off tech-
nically oriented paths. According to Eileen Pollack in her 2013 New York
Times op-ed, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?,” we’ve
seen young boys and men encouraged throughout generations to tough
out difficult science and math courses, from classrooms to labs.
HONORING BOOZ ALLEN’S
COMMITMENT TO WOMEN
++ Working Mother 100 Best Companies—Hall of Fame
++ Diversity Inc.—Top 50 Companies for Diversity
++ Latina Style Inc. Top 50—among the top 50
companies in the U.S. for hispanic women
++ Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality
Index—7th consecutive 100% rating
THE CONSTRICTING
TALENT PIPELINE
Only 12 out of 100 collegiate female undergraduates
pursue STEM-related majors. Of those female STEM
graduates who enter the workforce, only 25% continue
to work in STEM fields a decade later.
—Affordable Colleges Online, Women in STEM.
Meanwhile, girls—no matter how apt or able—all too often don’t
receive the same pushes from their parents, teachers, and counselors.
An implicit bias that math and science are for men permeates through
academic and scientific environments. The result of this bias is that it
may discourage many women from staying the course. Noted astro-
physicist Meg Urry has described the feeling as, “the slow drumbeat
of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable, and encountering
roadblocks along the path to success.”
“I was the only woman in the room—ever,” Mickie Bolduc states
matter-of-factly over a cup of coffee.
Mickie, a Senior Vice President with two degrees in mathematics,
has helped lead Booz Allen’s Systems Delivery business for two decades.
During her career, largely in the defense sector, she’s experienced
firsthand how underrepresented women are in meeting rooms as well
as classrooms, and the tension that exists within those spaces when
gender stereotypes clash. “It can be intimidating, but you have to respect
what you bring,” Mickie explains. “And I felt I had something to bring
to the table.”
Mickie now leads technical teams across various markets and technical
capabilities, and she and others at Booz Allen are actively mentoring
women one-on-one and sponsoring others to rise up through the firm.
“We want people to have a common view on what it means to be a STEM
woman at Booz Allen, and see that as an actual career path,” Mickie
says. “We have more role models now [because of our commitment].”
ALL ABOUT “LIKE ME”
When I think about the problems facing the world today, many of
them are complex technology integration problems, with solutions that
require associative, combinatory thinking. Women are great at this—
working problems with multiple variables up in the air. Women have
the tools, but they also need human support. That’s why mentorship
is so important.
DID YOU KNOW…?
On average, Women in STEM fields earn 92
cents on the dollar to STEM men, compared
to the 77 cents on the dollar that women
in non-STEM fields earn.
—“Mentors Help Create a Sustainable Pipeline
for Women in STEM.” —Forbes
KAKOLI KIM
Senior Associate Kakoli Kim has a PhD
in biochemistry and leads a group of
scientists out ofAberdeen,MD,supporting
Chemical Biological Defense. Her
team recently played a large role in
combating the Ebola outbreak,examining
threats to make sure theArmy was ready
to respond.“Most scientists thrive on
their love of discovery,” Kakoli says,“but
not for me. For me, it’s always been
about application.”
On March 8, 2016, Booz Allen hosted “Women
on the Leading Edge” in its new DC Innovation
Center, where executives from Hewlett Packard
Enterprise, Intel, Microsoft, Merck, and Booz
Allen explored how women will drive the future
of connected businesses.
22 | | 23BEATING THE DRUM OF DISCOVERY Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
13. Firmwide Women’s
Agenda established
Natalie Givans
named Engineer of
the Year by District
of Columbia Council
of Engineers and
Architects
2009
2010
First female
representation on
the leadership team
Joan Amble
named the first
woman to Booz
Allen’s Board of
Directors
Nancy Laben
joins Booz Allen as
first woman General
Counsel
Gretchen
McClain joins
Board of Directors
Melody Barnes
joins Board
of Directors
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
“Women want to look up to someone who looks like them,” Mickie
explains. “They have to see a path, and they have to see success.” As a
leader in Booz Allen’s Systems Delivery Group, Mickie has embraced
this idea of sponsorship. Leaders within the group identify up and
coming women across all of Booz Allen and place them in reciprocal
mentor-mentee positions where they can succeed. Then, they promote
those rising female leaders among senior leadership ranks.
“It’s all about ‘like me,’” says Karen Dahut, Executive Vice President
and leader of Booz Allen’s Civil Commercial Group. “Women need to
be able to look across institutions and organizations and see them-
selves in other women.” Karen has built her career on leadership and
lessons learned from great mentors and sponsors.
As Karen knows, there’s a nuanced difference between those two
ideas. Mentors help you understand the politics of an organization—
how you achieve, how you advance, how you develop and say what
you need to say. Sponsors, however, take action and pull you through.
Men have an essential role in mentorship and sponsorship, too. Men
need to encourage and have an active voice and participate in help-
ing women see themselves in these roles, and celebrate and advance
women as quickly as possible to make room for them at the table. Just
as my father and so many professors and colleagues embraced and
encouraged me along my path, so many more men across America
must do the same.
BEATING BACK THE BUTTERFLIES
There’s a perception out there that it’s hard to be a woman in STEM.
To varying degrees, that can be true, yet in some ways, it was easier to
be a woman in STEM. Being different can be a benefit. People remem-
ber you. It’s true of my career. I’ve always had a combination of the
butterflies in my stomach and the confidence to push myself, stretch
myself, and take comfort in the unknown. I believe this tension creates
our greatest work.
While it hasn’t always been culturally “attractive” to be a smart woman
in math and science, Booz Allen is changing that perception by changing
the conversation. Women at Booz Allen (and in general) are really good
at collaborating, integrating things, and working though problems.
These are all the essential components of a STEM education.
PUSHING FOR PROGRESS
Although Booz Allen in particular has made great strides inspiring
women and increasing access to STEM educations and careers in
particular, more work remains to be done. “Women like us won’t rest
until we feel like all women are treated fairly, equally, and have the
same opportunities and are compensated at the same level that men
are,” Susan concludes. “That’s what I want my legacy to be: I left it
better for women.”
For large companies like Booz Allen, diversity in STEM jobs doesn’t
just make good cultural sense—it’s good business. Differences in back-
grounds and technical knowledge produce better, more well-rounded
ideas and solutions. Without a diverse workforce, you lose out on those
serendipitous clashes of creativity and inspiration that have produced
some of the world’s greatest technological achievements. That is why
Booz Allen continues to drum the beat of discovery, and diversity, in
STEM. It’s good business.
PRI OBEROI
Whether it’s coding analytics for cancer
genome datasets for her client, or tracking
and cataloging social responses to
feminist movement, Pri Oberoi uses her
coding skills daily.“Everyone needs a
community that they can lean on to help
them navigate their career,” Pri com-
ments. A data scientist with a passion
for social equality, Pri serves as Recruiting
Chair for Booz Allen’s GLOBE Forum,
an internal group committed to advancing
the LGBT community within the firm, as
well as a mentor to rising young female
data scientists.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Booz Allen is strengthening the STEM pipeline
in America by sponsoring and participating in a
broad range of mentoring and immersive learning
opportunities among young students and
future professionals. Our people are passionate
about giving back and cultivating talent. We
have been a longtime sponsor and partner
of FIRST® Robotics, a robotics engineering
organization focused on inspiring young talent
to become science and technology leaders.
We work with Girls Who Code, and recently
launched and sponsored an initiative called
STEM Girls 4 Social Good.
In August, the firm hosted 40 young girls for
a week-long camp investigating the problem
of human trafficking through data science
techniques.
“The most powerful determinant of whether a
woman goes on in science might be whether
anyone encourages her to go on.”
—EILEEN POLL ACK, 2013
24 | | 25BEATING THE DRUM OF DISCOVERY Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
14. 26 | | 27SCIENCE NON-FICTION Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
37.50
50
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0116 17800880
357 492 0622 23
FROM THE DEVASTATING alien heat-ray in H.G. Wells’
War of the Worlds, to the handheld “phasers” that Captain
Kirk and crew wield in episodes of Star Trek, laser weapons
have long captured the imaginations of science fiction writers,
directors, and dreamers.
These concepts are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Booz
Allen engineers and scientists are helping the Department
of Defense (DoD) develop and test directed energy (DE)
weapons. With numerous advantages over traditional kinetic
weapons, DE has the potential to profoundly reshape the 21st-
century battlefield. And Booz Allen is on the front lines of
solving the technical and operational challenges associated
with building and deploying them on a wide scale.
WHAT IS DIRECTED ENERGY?
According to Joe Sifer, Executive Vice President and lead of
Booz Allen's Directed Energy business, “DE weapons transmit
or fire invisible beams or fields of concentrated electro
magnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles at a target.
Currently there are two basic categories of DE weapons—
high-energy laser (HEL) and high-powered microwaves (HPM)
—each of which have different potential applications.”
HELs can be deployed to protect critical areas and infrastruc-
ture, shoot down hypersonic cruise missiles or intercon-
tinental ballistic missiles, and take out aerial targets such
as UAVs from the ground or from the air. The technology
essentially uses lasers as a “blowtorch,” according to Principal
Joe Shepherd, a leader in the firm’s DE business. “The same
technology can be used at a lower energy to 'dazzle,' causing
temporary loss of camera imagery or blocking vision in a
cloak of colored light.”
Alternatively, HPM uses high-powered radio frequency (RF)
energy to disrupt a target, depositing electrical pulses or heat
to cause an adverse effect. It can be used to disable vehicles
and vessels and in counter-infrastructure operations by
shutting down non-shielded electronics. While less physically
destructive than a supercharged laser shot, HPM weapons can
give warfighters a tactical edge by eliminating the enemy’s
ability to use critical equipment.
15. CHEAPER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET
One of the most compelling advantages of DE over kinetic
weapons is in cost-per-shot. For DE, this is primarily the cost
of generating the power required to generate and transmit
the DE to the target.
“When using a kinetic weapon like a missile, you're taking
something more expensive than a UAV to take down a UAV,”
says Joe Shepherd. “With DE, you’re talking pennies per shot
compared to thousands per shot for a kinetic weapon.”
It turns out, a shot of DE is cheaper than a speeding bullet.
Beyond cost advantages, DE weapons offer the ability to “turn
the dial” on lethality. Captain Kirk was right. You can set your
phaser to stun. In many instances, a military operator may sim-
ply want to disable an approaching vehicle, rather than destroy
it—a capability that HPM, in certain applications, can perform.
“We don’t think of DE as a replacement for conventional
weapons, but as a complement. Incorporating DE can
reduce cost and collateral damage,” says Senior Associate
Patrick Shannon, who is focused on business development
and acquisition for DE at Booz Allen.
Because lasers allow for pinpoint accuracy in targeting, he
says, they can greatly limit collateral damage when engaging
a target. And since lasers travel at the speed of light, a target
cannot evade an accurately aimed HEL beam. Moreover, DE
can be difficult or impossible to detect, particularly with HPM.
Operators may be able to use HPM against electronic targets
without the enemy knowing until after the engagement.
INAUGURAL DIRECTED ENERGY SUMMIT
On July 28, 2015, Booz Allen hosted a first-of-
its-kind Directed Energy Summit in McLean, VA,
in partnership with the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments. The summit included
members of Congress, Department of Defense
stakeholders, and key members of the industrial
base that are applying independent research and
development to maturing DE technology. Booz
Allen is planning a follow-up event for mid-2016.
LASERS IN ACTION
In 2014, the Navy unveiled its Laser Weapon System (LaWS) a 30-kilowatt commercial welding laser
repurposed for installation on the USS Ponce. Booz Allen is responsible for the ongoing maintenance
and operation of the LaWS, which the Navy has successfully tested against small-boat and UAV targets,
destroying or disabling them with pinpoint accuracy. The LaWS has been so successful, in fact, that it
has been authorized for use as a defensive weapon, if necessary.
ELECTROMAGNETIC RAILGUN
At NSWC Dahlgren, Booz Allen’s engineering team
is helping to develop the pulse-forming network on
the navy’s experimental railgun. This technology
uses a powerful electromagnetic pulse to fire a
projectile at seven times the speed of sound and
costs far less than a traditional missile.
CIVILIAN APPLICATIONS
Directed energy technology isn’t limited to the military.
Potential civilian usages include non-lethal vehicle
and vessel stopping by law enforcement, laser-based
systems for long distances communications, and
possible breakthroughs in improving power-system
efficiency that could be applied in commercial sectors.
Captain Kirk was right.
You can set your phaser to stun.
28 | | 29SCIENCE NON-FICTION Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
1 34 678 9717
SIZE, WEIGHT, AND POWER
Yet, for all these potential benefits, developing DE weapons
isn’t without technical challenges. Current DE weapons are
large, heavy, and require huge amounts of power to fire.
“Most of the physics on the HEL side are reasonably understood,
and we’re getting there on HPM,” says Joe Sifer. “But the hard-
est part is you need these things packaged in a way that allows
you to use them in a practical and operational way.”
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
Today, approximately 65 Booz Allen engineers, scientists,
and mission operations specialists, together with nearly that
many subcontractor staff, are actively working to address
these challenges for the Navy. This team, which is primarily
based at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division
in Dahlgren, VA, performs research, develops requirements,
analyzes missions and engagements, conducts effects testing,
creates and deploys prototypes, and implements proofs-of-
concepts that are integrated on ships and other platforms.
For HPM in particular, Booz Allen engineers are focused on
“tuning” the RF to allow it to couple to the right target. It’s a
complex challenge. Determining the right frequency, source,
and power level to get a lock is a considerable physics problem.
BUILDING THE FRAMEWORK
Beyond the technical challenges of building and installing
a prototype like the Laser Weapon System (see “Lasers in
Action” on Page 28), Booz Allen is thinking through the
myriad military operational matters surrounding DE. We’re
helping the DoD understand how to integrate, deploy, and
operate these weapons within its warfighter doctrine, in
addition to building them.
“We’re working to get operational prototypes into an inventory so
that the whole doctrine—training, sustainment, all the things
that have to surround a system that’s being used long-term—
gets into infrastructure thinking about DE,” says Patrick.
THE LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE
Given their technical challenges and the need for a holistic
doctrine framework in order to use them, widespread
operational deployment of DE weapons is still many years
away. In the meantime, Booz Allen is focused on helping the
DoD develop the technology and understand how to deploy it
efficiently and effectively.
“We have an imperative at Booz Allen, because of our
broad-reaching technical expertise in DE, to move this
technology forward,” says Joe Shepherd. “That’s our focus.”
Booz Allen has served as the essential partner to defense
clients for more than 75 years. With engineering experts
in electromagnetics, prototype development, and systems
engineering among others, we’re ready to transform the
battlefield once more.
16. There has never been a more exciting time to be digital.
On October 14, 2015, Booz Allen Digital unveiled a bold new
message in the heart of Washington, D.C. In the Newseum’s
Knight Center, some 250 people from government, industry,
and the media huddled together for the Digital Innovation
Summit to discuss the future of digital disruption. Printed
storybooks circulated among the audience—storybooks that
conveyed a new focus for Booz Allen Digital: opening the
performance of clients by transforming them from closed,
proprietary systems into open agile enterprises.
ENVOI Articles interviewed the five leaders of Booz Allen Digital—Executive Vice President
Greg Wenzel, Senior Vice President Julie McPherson, and Vice Presidents Bill Ott, Munjeet Singh,
and Ralph Wade—to dig into the perspectives, the technology, and the ideas underlying the
Open Performance storybook, which you can read at www.boozallen.com/digital.
OPEN
PERFORMANCE
By Alex Haederle
ENVOI Articles: What does Booz Allen Digital look
like today, compared to two years ago? What’s new
and different?
Munjeet Singh: We’re a bit more edgy, that’s for sure.
Julie McPherson: Yeah, we’re bringing sexy
back to IT.
EA: You’re kidding.
JM: No, really! We’re glamorizing IT. Pushing
it back toward the edge of what it should be:
creative, connective, and repeatable—
Bill Ott: —and not process-heavy and risk-laden.
We’re rebooting that.
EA: How so?
BO: Well, development has changed. In the
pre-digital era, it used to be, “What can we do by our-
selves?” Now, it’s about open technology and com-
munities—so we’ve committed to being an active
leader and contributor within those communities.
30 | ARTICLE TITLE | 31Innovation Philosophy > ENVOI Articles
17. Greg Wenzel: The more you give away, the more
you get back.
MS: We’re trying to break the mold of our
traditional consulting service offerings—open
sourcing software, publishing thought pieces,
and making sure that people know and appreci-
ate our view in the marketplace.
Ralph Wade: It’s the open approach. We’re not
attempting to sell our solution; we’re going to
assemble the best open solution.
EA: In the storybook, you made it clear that “open”
means so much more than open source. Why is that?
MS: Because it doesn’t just mean open source.
Yes, we assemble open source software, but we’re
building open architectures, open standards,
we’re tapping open data through APIs, and
engaging in open source communities as well.
BO: So we embrace that, and we focus on solving
core needs through an open approach, from
how we employ development practices to the
platforms we work on.
EA: Why is reuse important to Booz Allen Digital?
GW: There’s so much IT out there. Anybody can
go develop apps. What sets you apart is how you
can reuse what exists to assemble new value.
JM: Ninety percent of anything anyone wants
to do has already been done. So why not spend
time on more valuable tasks?
BO: Yes. It’s about adding new customer and
user value on top of open products. Reuse isn’t
just about cost savings.
RW: But, that said, reuse is cheaper. Plus, if
you’re reusing a common service, then you can
build on top of it and standardize.
MS: Reuse is going to be adopted very aggres-
sively, very soon. We have an opportunity to
shape what that looks like, and be credited as
one of first consultancies to define it.
EA: You argue, “Many firms are big. Some are agile.
Few are both.” Those ideas seem contradictory to me.
BO: It comes down to our cultural mindset.
We think like a startup, but have the power of a
large company, with our access to partners and
technology.
MS: Right. It’s being able to harness that kind
of agile mindset—fast, modular, and flexible—
without being encumbered by institutional
barriers.
RW: We’re a big firm. But with “big” comes
resources, scale, and the ability to invest—
things that smaller firms mostly can’t do.
GW: And we love startups. But most startups
alone aren’t equipped to assemble a system of
systems, or migrate a government enterprise
to the cloud. So we partner with them.
EA: Got it. So that’s what you mean by, “It takes
an enterprise to transform an enterprise?”
RW: Exactly. We are the enterprise integrator.
We have a broad reach into a large number of
commercial and federal entities. Our partners
have the critical tech to help us do that.
GW: It’s a symbiotic thing. We get insight into
next-generation technologies our partners
create, and they get the benefit of our intimate
understanding of clients.
EA: On that note—how do you guys think about
partnerships?
JM: Our business partnerships used to be
transactional in nature. Now, though, it’s about
bringing clear, differentiated strengths to the
ecosystem.
MS: There’s great strength in partnerships.
The whole premise behind our “Don’t go it
alone” philosophy is linking up with those in
the market who have done it before.
BO: Exactly. Look at what we’re doing with Docker.
We knew Docker, and knew they had the micro-
service, containerization solution to help a major
federal client overhaul its Integrated Award
Environment. But, Docker didn’t know the client.
GW: We, however, do. So we came in and bro-
kered the relationship, giving Docker their first
customer. A big one.
JM: We were the glue that made that possible.
And that’s how we want to approach every
partnership.
EA: What are the business challenges associated
with transitioning government enterprises from
traditional IT to open, agile, mode 2 IT?
GW: The federal government has spent so much
on existing IT. They have smaller budgets now,
and can’t afford to sustain what they’ve got and
still modernize for the future.
RW: And culturally, most government clients
aren’t aligned to do that—the systems they’ve
got in place, budgeting, programmatic—as well
as risk.
MS: Clients need [IT systems] architecture that’s
lightweight and infrastructure that’s capable of
immediacy. Changeable and transportable, too,
so clients aren’t locked into vendors.
JM: You’ve got to have fortitude. And trust in a
forward thinking, risk-embracing mentality. It’s
what’s essential for open performance.
EA: What does “open performance” mean?
RW: When you think of performance, you think
of speed…but there’s also a measure of, “How
much have I opened my enterprise up?”
JM: And that’s what we do. Open performance
is our promise: that embracing an open mantra
unleashes better performance within, and for,
your enterprise.
GW: It’s also a state—when you’re no longer
locked into proprietary vendors and have the
power of choice in your systems and technology.
MS: We enable that state. We transform organi
zations from closed, proprietary systems to
open, agile enterprises. And we do it collabora-
tively and transparently.
BO: It’s about opening up the realm of possibility.
Open technologies, coupled with open attitudes,
will propel you forward. That’s open perfor-
mance.
FOR BUSINESS
KNOWLEDGE THAT POWERS YOUR FUTURE
DIGITAL
WORKFORCE
PLAYBOOK
<<< DIGITAL STORYBOOK
A BETTER WAY TO OPEN YOUR PERFORMANCE
DIGITAL WORKFORCE PLAYBOOK
TOOLS FOR GETTING THINGS DONE
VISIT WWW.BOOZALLEN.COM/DIGITAL
32 | OPEN PERFORMANCE | 33Innovation Philosophy ENVOI Articles
18. Today, Booz Allen serves as the essential partner to
some of the world’s biggest organizations. We have
a relentless commitment to take on, tinker with,
and solve their most complex challenges.
PLACING AUDACIOUS BETS
After the financial turbulence of 2008 and
subsequent changes in government spending,
our clients faced shrinking budgets and rising
expectations. This presented Booz Allen with
an opportunity to invest in those areas our
clients would need when the markets returned.
As part ofour Vision 2020 strategy, we created
the Strategic Innovation Group (SIG): a focused
agenda of investments that anticipate the future of
cyber, data science, digital, and our own culture.
While the SIG’s configuration and intent promotes
experimentation around specific initiatives, we
didn’t isolate it from the rest of the firm. In fact,
we did the opposite. The SIG partners with our
market accounts and entire talent base to incubate
original capabilities. But with a market rebound
and a return to growth, we are now expanding
our investments to meet the surging demand for
these new capabilities.
This April 2016, we activated five Functional Service
Offerings (FSOs) in Analytics, Cyber, Engineering
and Science, Management Consulting, and Systems
Delivery. Each FSO is an independent, yet integrated,
horizontal business charged with scaling capabili-
ties within and across vertical market accounts.
Coupled with a centralized functional talent model,
each FSO will find and rotate in talent to transport
and apply new capabilities to new clients with
fresh problem sets. In doing so, the FSOs will
increase our agility to move on meaningful work,
and make meaningful moves on furthering our
talent experience.
Edwin Booz pioneered the notion that a group of people
outside a business could analyze its challenges and advise
on strategies to improve its operations. This vision both
precipitated the establishment of Booz Allen and the industry
of management consulting.
FUNCTIONAL
GROWTH
By Susan Penfield
| 35Innovation Philosophy ENVOI Articles
19. ACCELERATING FLOW
What’s more, the flow of intellectual capital and
resources can increase proportionally to the
number of intersections among our accounts
and functional areas.
For example, in the future
when a leader identifies a
market opportunity to solve
a client’s technical engineer-
ing challenge, they can
access the Engineering and
Science FSO. Knowing who
to reach for in a large organi-
zation is a significant step to
codify. In the past we relied
on our entrepreneurial cul-
ture—with great success—but can now respond to
market needs faster through a disciplined process.
The FSO then takes part in solving the capability
challenge. Rotating in the right engineers and the
smartest intellectual capital from across the firm
both improves our ability to match the challenge
and constructs a pipeline around our engineering
capability in a new market.
CONNECTING TALENT TO MEANINGFUL WORK
Stronger functional agendas and inspired talent
are inextricably linked to top and bottom line
sustainable growth. After all, the growth of our
core business underpins
and strengthens both the
success of our talent and
our expanding capabilities.
Yes, we will go to market
faster. We will continue
to build original value for
our clients.
With the rotational nature
of the FSOs, our function-
ally aligned talent will
become even more valuable
to the market upon their return to those teams.
The FSOs make it easier to harvest new capabilities,
forge meaningful connections, advance careers, and
leave an imprint on Booz Allen and our clients.
INSPIRING A COLLECTIVE MINDSET
We’re not starting from scratch. We’ve always
examined problems through a functional lens.
Our 17 Functional Communities, for instance,
challenge inspired talent to put their functional
skills to the test on problems beyond their daily
client work. In these communities, our talent
socialize their best ideas with their colleagues
and learn new techniques to solve old problems.
Our talent enjoys participating and networking
in these communities. They’re not going away.
Rather, the FSOs build upon these pillars of
community and intellectual capital. They will
codify and centralize functional talent and scale
a functional mission across our business.
This starts with adding to the outlook of our
people and the alignments across our business.
We have always had market leaders running
account portfolios. That won’t change. But
we’re now charging executives to lead growth
from a functional perspective and seek out
opportunities to expand solutions within each
market account.
Functionally aligned talent will have expanded
opportunities to explore the challenges associated
with building, scaling, and standardizing the
delivery of original capabilities with transformative
value for Booz Allen and our clients.
The Systems Delivery team has assembled a cohesive
framework and management process for all of
Booz Allen’s systems delivery jobs. Think of it as
a Starbucks coffee approach applied to software
delivery. The team has standardized our software
delivery process so that every project, regardless
of team or geography, tastes like Booz Allen.
As market and FSO teams aggregate talent and
resources, account leaders will be able to identify
the resources and intellectual capital they need
to grow their value to clients through an expand-
ing capability set. Likewise, capability leaders
will have access to resources and problem sets to
apply their solutions in new ways and inspire an
institutional view of expertise and lifecycle talent
management through accounts. It’s a virtuous
circle that further streamlines investment, scopes
a sensible risk posture, and inspires a collective
mindset through reciprocal gains.
Yes, we will go to
market faster.
We will continue to
build original value
for our clients.
ENGINEERING
SCIENCE
SYSTEMS
DELIVERY
CYBER
ANALYTICS
MANAGEMENT
CONSULTING
36 | | 37FUNCTIONAL GROWTH Innovation Philosophy ENVOI Articles
20. WITH
CHARACTERS
Booz Allen has come a long way since guiding our
first client—the Illinois State Railroad—and pio-
neering management consulting. But we’ve never
been constrained to a predetermined track.
Our expertise, best practices, and work ethic have
revolutionized how industries think over generations
and taught us that the trades of 1914, while founda-
tional, can no longer push our clients forward.
So we evolved.
Today, we’re the leading generation of builders.
We’re scientists, engineers, technologists, and
storytellers inspired by collaboration and the
desire to solve a problem that matters. It’s why our
data scientists diagnose medical research with the
latest algorithms, and our engineers prototype
new technology to counter improvised explosive
devices. It’s why our developers reboot the conven-
tions of software delivery, and our interns build
models to detect human trafficking.
We’re at our best when the stakes are high and
the problems are big.
The truth is, we’re still keeping our clients on the
tracks—and daring them to think beyond the pre-
dictable. We have always been driven by a united
purpose to make the world better, safer, and more
connected. We’ve simply expanded how we do it.
Booz Allen starts with characters. And you can
be one of them. If you see yourself in these
characters and you want to leave an imprint on
the world, then join us.
We’re waiting for you.
BOOZALLEN.COM/CAREERS
BOOZ ALLEN STARTS
| 39We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles38 | BOOZ ALLEN STARTS WITH CHARACTERS
By Aimee George Leary
21. Management consulting is a $200 billion global industry of analyzing
problems and developing plans for better performance. It’s about determining
which business models to follow, products to build, investments to grow,
and how to structure management when an organization undergoes change.
And it’s in the middle of a transformation.
Digital technology has disrupted the status quo of businesses everywhere
and changed the paradigm for how the management consultant delivers
solutions. The shift to a data-driven economy, led by the rise of cheap, powerful
cloud computing, has clients demanding new answers for increasingly
complex, technology-centric problems.
THE
MANAGEMENT
CONSULTANT
22. In a world where business value is increasingly
created on software platforms, the Booz Allen
management consultant will be a strategist who
can also program in Python, or an engineer who
can pragmatically explain new business models
enabled by distributed ledgers.
TOMORROW’S MANAGEMENT
CONSULTANT
Tomorrow’s biggest challenges chiefly include
growth, digital transformation and user experience,
cost cutting, environmental and social responsibil-
ity, security and risk, and change management.
And the management consultant creates value by
coupling business insights with knowledge of tech-
nology, analytics, and service design to solve those
challenges. They fall into one of three types.
Tech-savvy strategists are classic generalists who
“minor” in a technology or information disciplines
like analytics, digital UI/UX, or DevOps. They work
to identify technological ways to increase revenues,
cut costs, or outmaneuver competitors. They join
Booz Allen from top-tier programs and look to
invigorate clients with modern spins on traditional
consulting approaches.
Business-savvy technologists speak in business
language and have experience in designing,
SOFT SKILLS, HARD PROBLEMS
The management consultant understands their
client’s mission as their clients do. They frame
problems correctly (and frame correct problems),
gather valuable data, and
synthesize a practical
answer. Their recommen-
dations are born of knowl-
edge and experience,
not intuition. They’re the
ultimate change agent,
committed to helping
clients win support and
institute the transforma-
tions they need.
These characteristics
have always defined
the management consultant. Challenges excite
them, and fitting pieces together to solve a client’s
puzzle is what they savor most. Since 1914, the
Booz Allen management consultant has devised
business and IT strategies, implemented organiza-
tional redesigns and developments, reengineered
business processes, and managed change for
some of the world’s biggest and most dynamic
organizations.
The challenges these dynamic organizations face
require equally dynamic individuals focused on
solving them. The management consultant is just
that—a creative, collaborative, business-savvy
connector who moves fast, yet stays grounded in
economics and business operations.
Traditionally, the management consultant has
been seen as a generalist: a voracious learner who
testing, and launching new services
and products. They embrace a lean
startup mindset and believe in proto-
typing with real clients and customers.
Whether you’re from Silicon Valley or
Silicon Alley, you can help introduce
leading technology platforms to some of the biggest
federal and commercial clients out there.
Industry-savvy quants have backgrounds in
research, analytics, and core mission-oriented
functions and have a sixth sense for what it takes
to drive change within a client’s organization.
We love evolving them into light data scientists,
schooled in emerging modeling techniques and
technologies to inform problem-solving.
These new pioneers are
user-centered, digital, and
diverse. They never stop
learning and stay one step
ahead of their clients.
They are management
consultants, after all.
can add value to just about everything. While they
may not know the single answer to a problem,
they do know the dozen analyses that need to be
performed to find it.
Tomorrow’s management consultant, however,
won’t settle for generalities.
TODAY’S FUTURE IS TOMORROW’S PAST
For much of the last 50 years, consultants created
value through clever financial restructuring,
mergers and acquisitions, and strategic position-
ing recommendations delivered to a client in a
final presentation after
a few months of work.
Most, but not all, gradu-
ated from top-tier MBA
programs and deployed
generalist business strat-
egy skills to solve client
problems.
Today’s clients have been to business school,
have a CPA, or have been consultants themselves.
They are increasingly asking outside experts
to bring non-traditional solutions to address their
top priorities.
Whether it’s “Uber-ifying” a mobile app to create
a frictionless customer experience, deploying
data scientists and enterprise architects to build
a new financial product platform, or creating
an IT strategy that works with existing clouds
and sales tools, the problems have changed.
Traditional generalists simply aren’t equipped
to solve them.
Classic Problems the
Management Consultant Solves
++ Businss and IT Strategy
++ Organizational Design and
Development
++ Shared Services
++ Change Management
++ Business Process Reengineering
++ Customer Relationship Management
++ Performance Management
Tomorrow's Management
Consultants
++ The Tech-savvy Strategist
++ The Business-savvyTechnologist
++ The Industry-savvy Quant
Digital Disruption
CEOs expect to make 40% of corpo-
rate revenue from digital channels
by 2019, and digitally driven manage-
ment consulting will grow by 12.6%
CAGR in that same time frame.
They’re the ultimate change agent, committed
to helping clients win support and institute the
transformations they need.
42 | | 43THE MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
23. THE
CLOUD
ARCHITECT
Rapid evolution of the cloud market has introduced new IT challenges, as
organizations move from closed, proprietary systems to open agile enterprises.
Organizations struggle to traverse this digital terrain alone. They must swap
heavy capital investments in storage systems for variable, but on-demand,
virtual computing resources. They want more speed and agility and can’t
afford to guess at infrastructure capacity, nor the high costs of running and
maintaining data centers.
While many see these challenges as frustrating, the cloud architect thinks
differently. They see digital not as it is, but as it could be.
24. SHERPAS OF SCALE
Technology is evolving at a pace most struggle to
keep, and tension exists between the operational
necessity to maintain lumbering legacy systems and
the imperative to invest in higher-order business
needs through a modernized enterprise. From bare-
metal interfaces to community-driven DevOps
practices that scale micro-services across a multi-
cloud environment, every organization is some-
where along the spectrum of cloud transition.
The cloud architect is the Sherpa
who guides the journey. They
assess a client’s IT maturity,
work with them to articulate
and capture their blueprint for
the future, and set a course to
get there together.
They’re trusted, resourceful
leaders. They possess strategic
knowledge of on-demand tech-
nology, platforms and providers, and know how to
match the right tool to the right business problem.
RELATIONSHIPS ARE EVERYTHING
The cloud architect builds the connections
between executives and application deployment
teams. But they build confidence in cloud projects,
too. They have an aptitude for managing vendor
relationships, defining computing loads, negotiat-
ing licenses, and understand the dynamics of a
virtual work environment in order to find the
right cloud solution for a client.
It’s a job that requires related, yet distinct skills.
Chart a cloud adoption plan. Design a cloud appli-
cation. Broker a cloud management and monitor-
ing strategy. The cloud architect maps application
architecture and deployment in virtual environ-
ments—public, private, and hybrid clouds—and
acts as a companion who keeps clients up to date
on the latest trends and issues.
But above all, the Booz Allen cloud architect leads.
They’re adept at translating business problems and
requirements into practical solutions that technical
teams can build. This requires a communicator’s
tongue, matched with a project management eye,
attributes that allow them to overcome pressure to
deliver on time and on budget.
Cloud-First,
Says the President
In 2011, the White House
released the Federal Cloud
Computing Strategy report,
mandating that government
agencies must evaluate safe,
secure cloud computing
options prior to making any
new investments in IT.
What Happens When a Cloud Bursts?
Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound
annual growth rate,from nearly $70B in 2015 to more than $141B in 2019.
Source: Forbes, Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market
Estimates, 2016
Booz Allen’s open source cloud broker platform allows
clients to manage, automate, and control complex cloud
environments.An intuitive front-end interface connects
buyers to cloud products, and simplifies decision-making
for enterprises with multiple cloud services. In December
2015, the platform integrated with ManageIQ, the upstream
open source community that forms the basis of Red Hat
CloudForms.This integration marked a major step forward
for cloud brokering and the unified management of infra-
structures and applications in hybrid cloud environments.
EXPLORE THE CODE AT: https://github.com/projectjellyfish,
OR VISIT: projectjellyfish.org.
46 | THE CLOUD ARCHITECT
MANY FIRMS ARE BIG. SOME ARE AGILE. FEW ARE BOTH.
boozallen.com/digital
25. THE
DATA
SCIENTIST
Not everyone is willing to take the risks to solve the big problems. Even fewer
are equipped to do so. They’re afraid of failure, and fixing a symptom instead
of the underlying condition.
But, when the data scientist asks questions of data that nobody else thinks to
ask, they cure healthcare inefficiencies, build anti-money-laundering models
to thwart crime, program the future of artificial intelligence, drive advances
in connected vehicles, and diagnose climate change.
The data scientist doesn’t care how big your data is, and they’re not interested
in incremental change. They dare to transform society.
Changing the World
with Data Science
+ Participates in the Booz
Allen-sponsored Data
Science Bowl, the world’s
largest data science compe-
tition for social good
+ Takes part in the Hackathon
for Hope to create analytical
models to prevent genocide
+ Partners with a nonprofit
that maps human traffick-
ing networks
+ Sponsors workshops to get
middle and high school
girls interested in STEM
They’re grounded in
Hadoop, Python, and
R. These languages allow
them to run complex
algorithms over raw data
using techniques such
as data classification,
regression, and clustering.
An Eclectic Diverse Team
Booz Allen’s data scientists include
a former artist, an architect, two
rocket scientists, a forester, and
multiple physicists.What’s more,
Booz Allen employs the most female
data scientists in the industry.
The Biggest Problems
The data scientist dares to take on the
most challenging problems in government
and industry.
++ LIFE SCIENCES:
Prescribing new research and
development processes for biophar-
maceutical companies
++ DEFENSE:
Creating tools for the Navy to predict
patient behavior and evaluate different
scenarios at medical centers
++ FEDERAL REGULATORY:
Streamlining medication review for
regulatory bodies
++ SPORTS:
Helping sports franchises optimize
performance on the field, off the field,
and in the stands
The data scientist has
changed the perspective of
business. Techniques like
deep learning augment
human intelligence and
enable people to work more
effectively and efficiently.
The wearable revolution
is democratizing data for
a new generation of sports
and fitness enthusiasts.
| 49We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
26. There are questions that terrify millions and stir world leaders and CEOs in
their sleep. Will North Korea develop a hydrogen bomb? Will Turkey continue
to attack the Kurdistan Workers Party separatist group? Which Fortune 500
company will be the target of the next crippling network attack?
Rarely are there easy and immediate answers to these questions. Along with
their scale and significance, it’s the element of mystery that makes them so
scary. But it’s also what attracts the intelligence analyst to Booz Allen.
The intelligence analyst sleuths to solve the major economic, military, diplomatic,
and scientific problems with no clear answers. It’s a job as complex and opaque
as assembling a 3-D jigsaw puzzle without the box cover.
THE
INTELLIGENCE
ANALYST
The intelligence analyst seeks out raw information
to establish connections and develop hypotheses
of the most likely situational outcomes. It’s crucial
for their analysis to be actionable, with predictions
and options for leaders to best allocate resources
and counter threats. Human lives and critical
infrastructure are often at stake.
Critical thinking is a fundamental trait. They’re
equal measure predictive detective and proac-
tive entrepreneur. Tirelessly, they search for the
signs that point to what might happen next, and
constantly consider new methods and tools to
reach those conclusions faster.
Strong research skills are likewise essential,
as the intelligence analyst must scrutinize and
synthesize information from a wide variety
of sources. They’ll switch between long-term
research to determine the decades-long effects
of the UK’s potential exit from the European
Union and quick-turn projects to uncover
whether a terror group is planning an attack
in the Sinai Peninsula.
| 51We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
27. AN INTEGRAL INVESTMENT
The intelligence analyst plays an essential role in
protecting our nation. With latitude to see their
ideas put into action and the space to collaborate
with beautiful minds, they discover skills and
techniques critical to cracking their next case.
Discover your next challenge at:
BOOZALLEN.COM/CAREERS.
THE SOFTER SCIENCES
The intelligence analyst is grounded in the social
sciences, and sometimes, military intelligence.
They couple traditional skills with domain experi-
ence in a particular region, language, or culture,
or with technical expertise in engineering or
programming.
KNOWING JUST TO KNOW
Do you ever realize you’ve spent an hour cruising
through Wikipedia articles when you only meant
to look up one topic? The intelligence analyst finds
fun in knowing things just for the knowing and
drawing connections among things in the world
around them. They’re inquisitive, creative, and
intellectually curious,
with highly ana-
lytical minds. And
they’re also voracious
readers.
Coming to Commercial
The value of intelligence is growing beyond military and
clandestine applications.Today, the commercial sector seeks
the intelligence analyst's expertise. Industries include:
++ Retail
++ Financial Services
++ Automotive
++ Oil and Gas
Adopting the Attitude
Like a gumshoe on stakeout, the intel-
ligence analyst blends into the culture
of the client they are serving. They’re
typically embedded on-site in civilian
and military agencies.
Critical thinking is a fundamental trait.
They’re equal measure predictive
detective and proactive entrepreneur.
52 | THE INTELLIGENCE ANALYST
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ORIGINAL STORIES
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. 002Articles
28. It’s 7:35 PM at a downtown Washington, D.C., restaurant. A plate of half eaten
dumplings and soft drinks drank to the dregs litter the table. Every few minutes,
an idea floats out from one of the half-dozen interns. It’ll land however it does—
either challenged, or celebrated—before they move on to the next.
10:30 AM the next morning, and the scene isn’t much different. Laptops running
shell scripts and regression analyses replace the dumplings, and expo markers
scatter the tables of a conference room. But the opinions keep flying. The problems
they’re solving are big ones, as the intern challenges at Booz Allen range from
ending human trafficking, to engineering a polygraph machine for Twitter, to
installing cameras into quad-copters to find victims in the wake of a disaster.
THE
INTERNS
STANDING OUT IN A CROWD
But the intern isn’t limited to a group. They’re
encouraged to pursue their own ideas. After hours,
they scribble, scrap, and scheme up a pitch to
solve a problem plaguing society. The winner gets
invited back the following semester to create
a proof of concept for their pitch.
Whether alone or in groups, the intern shapes
their own experience. With each brainstorm,
answers become sharper and more defined. When
they have an idea or a new opinion, they’re com-
pelled to share it with their colleagues. Buzzing
teammates on GroupMe, or scheduling a pickup
kickball game, the intern is always available to
debate and collaborate with their peers. In this
constant conversation, the intern finds not just
inspiration, but friends, and the chance to make
a difference in the world.
Collaborative challenges consume the intern from early morning to late
evening. They have a perspective, and they’re not shy about sharing it.
That’s by design. In diverse teams, it’s the ability to debate and examine
their thinking that leads to greater clarity.
| 55We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
29. THE
CREATIVE
Anyone can add more stuff to a deliverable: more fluff, more words, another
idea, and extra details. But the creative see things differently. They know
complex problems don’t always need complex solutions. In fact, more often
than not, it’s the opposite. A complex problem, fully understood and elegantly
presented, is simple to understand.
The creative takes the time to learn the complexities of their clients’ audiences,
to scrub their data, to comb through their research, and to extract the insights,
but deliver something simple. Something enduring. Something memorable.
The creative feels compelled to refine meaning by removing information.
For them, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
30. MAKING TALKING
“Where do your original ideas come from?” For
the Booz Allen creative, they aren’t conjured up
by magic, but discipline. They are the output
of a process-driven mandate to think differently
through the assembly of associative, divergent,
convergent, collaborative, and usually caffeinated
thinking, combined with deep craftsmanship.
Like their consultant and technical peers, the
creative starts with a clear understanding of
the problem. Research forms their common
sense foundation. It’s a perpetual exercise in
sifting through details and statistics, rotating
ideas through associative contexts and market
research—stepping back to let the notes and
connections ruminate—and transforming diver-
gent debate to informed opinions. Only then do
they arrive at an original perspective that others
haven’t considered.
At times this means the creative will serve up
answers to questions their clients didn’t ask or
couldn’t have imagined. They do this because
they’re not interested in listing out a menu of all
the possible solutions (they’re not solely produc-
tion artists, after all). They’re attracted to the
business problems implied by a client’s request.
But, like the developer who would rather ship code,
or the engineer who prefers to prototype a minimum
viable product, the Booz Allen creative knows that
making something creates more value than talking
about it. And they have the splinters to prove it.
BIG PROBLEMS TO SOLVE
The Booz Allen creative touches every part of
business. They’re at their best when the prob-
lems are big and when
they’re associating the
ideas of management
consultants with think-
ing from engineers, data
scientists, and others.
The engineer can
show you how to build
something, but the
creative motivates you to
pick it up and play with
it. Together, they tackle
the business problems of motivation, experience,
awareness, engagement, and participation.
A TEAM OF TRADES
The creative builds success not as a lone inventor,
but as part of a diverse team of highly skilled
tradespeople who chisel, plane, and join together
the different parts of a single idea. They don’t just
value collaboration; they’re inspired by it.
Daily, they roll up their sleeves and join forces with
writers, strategists, and technologists. They share a
common desire to make something useful that will
also amaze. It’s why they get in early and stay late.
THE TASTE OF SUCCESS
Clients are becoming more astute about how they
buy strategy, design, and creative services. They
know the way their audiences experience things
matters. Giving them a flavor they enjoy and one
they’ll want to try again is essential to success.
These clients have the ability to wonder but often
lack the skill to execute. The creative helps deliver
on that promise.
Getting the flavor of those experiences just right
is a delicate balance. Too bland and the taste won't
linger. Too rich and people will assume the solu-
tion is either artificial or overbearing. But when
the recipe is just right, the experience creates
something memorable and enjoyable that spills
over long after the moment has passed.
We’ve all tasted it. It’s the difference between the
right word and the almost right word in a line of
copy, the intuitive functionality of a web app that
anticipates your behavior, or the experience design
of a training that motivates you to keep learning.
It’s that taste that clients have come to expect.
More importantly, it’s what creatives have come to
expect from themselves.
Sound fun? You bet it is.
Creative vs. Art
Creative is the original idea that solves a business problem.
Art is the applied expression of that creative. It can take
the form of a product design, a mobile app, a speech, visual
identity, video, brand strategy, event experience, or whatever
is needed to solve the problem.
Creative Roles at Booz Allen
++ Creative Director
++ Art Director
++ Designer
++ Animator
++ Producer
++ Videographer
++ Copywriter
++ Brand Marketing Strategist
The Booz Allen creative touches
every part of business.
The Value of Creative
Creativity will rise from the 10th
most valuable business skill in
2015 to 3rd by 2020.
—Future of Jobs Report,
World Economic Forum
58 | | 59THECREATIVE We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
31. As the consultant’s consultant, the talent agent is at the heart of the Booz
Allen experience. They work to attract talent to Booz Allen and to discover
and promote the things that keep them here. Yet, when you peel away the
analytics, development, actions, and empathy, the talent agent cultivates
the answer to a single question: “Why Booz Allen?”
THE
TALENT AGENT
THEY CONNECT YOU TO CLIENTS
The talent agent is the face and the voice of
Booz Allen recruiting. The job requires constant
balance of client needs and technical skill, with
cultural fit and marketing savvy. The talent agent
collaborates with teams across the business to
analyze market and growth opportunities and
couple those insights with creative strategies to
find compelling, qualified candidates.
THEY CARE ABOUT YOUR WORK
Careers at Booz Allen are an assembly of multiple
jobs and experiences. Talent may work on several
projects over the course of a career. It’s a function
of expanding interests and business realities.
As client engagements end and original capabili-
ties emerge, the talent agent connects teams to
potential clients and talent to fresh opportunities.
Facilitating new ideas and perspectives is essential
to maintaining an inspired workforce.
| 61We Are Innovators ENVOI Articles
