WT Innovator: Novetta looks inward for innovation
By
Nick Wakeman
With review processes and employee engagement programs, Novetta creates a culture that fuels innovation.
Novetta has made its mark in the government market as an analytics company but it also had a process in place to continually assess its structure and capabilities to make sure it is meeting the mission demands of its customers.
That review process helped the company identify the growing demand for cybersecurity offerings from its customers. Novetta also realized it had cybersecurity capabilities spread across its operations.
The company pulled those fragmented cyber capabilities into its own division: Cyber Defense and Enablement, known as CDE. The division augments Novetta’s data analytics work. It also has developed new offerings and helped attract experts to come to the company.
“In many ways, [CDE] has allowed us to take our reputation for solving the hard problems in the analytical world and translate that into solving the hard problems in the cyber domain,” the company wrote in its nomination for the WT Industry Innovator awards.
The creation of CDE and other actions such as technology alliances, R&D, and corportate structure helped the company land a spot as a finalist.
Novetta’s structure is critical to its innovation culture. It created the CDE unit by pulling together already existing capabilities and also has incentive programs to draw the best from employees.
Novetta fosters innovation through recognition programs, compensation and a culture of continues learning, development and collaboration. This has helped the company attract highly skilled employees.
The company has worked to maintain a flat start-up culture. It conducts tech meetups, social outings, and team building activities and exchanges. Novetta leaders hold “get togethers” for domain subject matter experts to build personal relationships and enhance collaboration.
Novetta also has an annual innovation competition for employees to submit innovative ideas. The winner receives a cash bonus and a budget and the time to bring the idea to fruition.
In addition to cybersecurity, some of the technology areas the company is focused on include networking, infrastructure, big data, artificial intelligence, mobility and cloud computing. Some of Novetta’s tech alliances include relationships with Amazon Web Services and Databricks.
The Databricks alliance allowed Novetta to layer its analytics capabilities on top of Databricks management platform. The solution is marketed to meet customers infrastructure management needs.
The company has worked with AWS since 2013 and is an Advanced Tier Consulting partner, which has helped it win work with customer looking to migrate their data analytics to the cloud.