Top 100: Booz Allen's new CEO keeps focus on Vision 2020 growth initiative

Jan. 1 was more than just the start of a new year for Booz Allen Hamilton—it was the beginning of a new chapter for the company with Horacio Rozanski taking the reigns as president and CEO.

But in many ways, not much changed at Booz Allen given Rozanski is the man behind the company’s Vision 2020 initiative that focuses on growth.

Vision 2020, like the Vision 2000 initiative led by Rozanski’s predecessor, Ralph Shrader, is all about transformation.

Back in 2013, when the initiative was conceived, “we started taking a look at things like value proposition to our people, growth strategies, we took a look at our infrastructure, how do we support our teams, how do we deal with internal technology,” said Gary Labovich, executive vice president at Booz Allen.

It was all about asking “where do we want to be in 2020,” he added. That led to restructuring the company with a focus on five primary areas: engineering, systems delivery, strategic innovation, commercial international business and cyber.

“We’re making a commitment to invest in growth, and those are the areas that we think are going to have quality, sustainable growth in the long term,” Labovich said.

Now, the company is in its third year of Vision 2020, and things are going “exceedingly well,” Labovich said.

The company is ranked No. 7 on the 2015 Washington Technology Top 100 with $3.7 billion in prime contracts.

Booz Allen’s success is evident through some major contract awards the company has won over the past year, not the least of which is a spot on the Air Force’s $7.9 billion NetCents 2 network operations and infrastructure contract.

“We were also really delighted to win one of the first task orders on the [Homeland Security Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation] contract. We won the IDIQ and we won the $39 million single-award task order to provide anything from tools and sensors to integration for any agency in government,” Labovich said.

Labovich is optimistic that the company will continue to find success in the future, even with a rocky budget landscape.

“We’re seeing encouraging signs in the market,” he said. “We feel that there will be some semblance of budget stability, and we feel that is a good thing for us.”

That said, the company plans to continue to invest in innovation. “Clients are looking for new ways of doing business and are trying to figure out how to do it more effectively and more efficiently, and we’re making huge investments in using new methodologies,” Labovich said, especially agile software development methodologies.

The company also focuses on innovation through the strategic innovation group that it stood up over a year ago as part of Vision 2020. The group, comprised of about 1,500 employees, focuses on next generation problems and technologies that are faced by Booz Allen’s client base.

The company has many clients, but Labovich said that Booz Allen looks for truly critical work. “We’re not interested necessarily in the low end business; we’re interested in those clients who need mission-critical work.”