A look at the inner and outer workings of Booz Allen's new 'VoLT' strategy

Booz Allen Hamilton’s unveiling in October of its new strategy for employees and executives to carry out, and investors to consider, is not a big departure from the previous Vision 2020.

In fact, the themes that are spelled out in the new “VoLT” acronym can speak for themselves somewhat: Velocity, Leadership and Technology. What is now VoLT is essentially more iterative from Vision 2020 and how that strategy shaped the government technology and consulting company into what it is today.

Frank DiGiammarino, who leads Booz Allen’s solutions and innovation strategy, summarized to me the new strategy as about getting access to both the technology and markets that can help clients “leapfrog and have impact faster” than before.

Part of that effort is the firm’s external technology scouting function. Through that avenue, the firm casts its eyes across Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country for new tools and solutions that can be funneled into the federal environment.

“This frame of having the access to what is happening externally at speed that we can bring in at speed to our clients is super important,” said DiGiammarino, an executive vice president.

DiGiammarino said Booz Allen is growing its tech scouting and partner teams, plus the company has built up its own venture capital arm “to make deliberate investments to scale the companies that are doing interesting work across the tech stack.”

Finding the tech outside of itself is one thing, but doing what needs to be done internally in order to get those tools to agencies is the other part. DiGiammarino highlighted experimentation, prototyping and concept testing as among the internal efforts Booz Allen focuses on with the tech in hand.

What happens across the overall technology stack is challenging to both government agencies and entities in the private sector as they attempt to figure out which tools can be applied to solve certain problems.

Clients also want to understand what companies can come forward with those solutions whether they be established businesses or startups, DiGiammarino said.

Speed also is front-of-mind for enterprises when deciding what technologies to buy, he said.

“The development, deployment and integration of emerging tech has only accelerated over the past decade, and this is also an indication of the broader public and private sector markets’ comfort levels with technology,” DiGiammarino said.

Enter cloud computing into that overall discussion of speed and comfort, which also informs DiGiammarino’s thinking on this. He was the fourth member of the public sector leadership team at Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud subsidiary.

During those early days of AWS, very few customers, if any, were asking for what we now know as “cloud.” There likely were a lot of questions and skepticism both internally and externally at the time.

“Now it is part of the infrastructure, it is the fabric for how work gets done, and in fact is enabling us to attack missions in a completely different way,” DiGiammarino said.

Cloud also enables so many other technologies across the stack that lead to these questions DiGiammarino hears from clients:

“Which tech? Where do I go? How do I figure out where we’re going to pull all of this in?,” he said. “We’ve got to build the processes to quickly understand the technology landscape and quickly pull the right pieces together.”