How Booz Allen thrives on tech disruption

Administrations come and go. Priorities shift and new ones emerge.

But there is one constant in the federal market – disruption.

“The core missions of the agencies don’t change, but everyday there is disruption,” said Richard Crowe, president of Booz Allen Hamilton's civil sector. “We are in an age of constant change because of technology.”

Crowe said change and disruption are normal with any new administration, but added he sees things as settling down.

With this second Trump term, Crowe expects more of a focus on modernization and efficiency. Those were major themes of the first Trump term.

“We saw a significant increase in implementing IT modernization across many, many agencies during the first term,” Crowe said. “Given what we are hearing publicly from the transition team, those themes are going to carry forward.”

No matter what happens in the White House and with a Republican-controlled Congress, Crowe said that Booz Allen will follow the guideposts it has followed throughout its 110-year history. One of them is focusing on the outcomes its customers want to realize.

Applying technology to those outcomes remains a critical component of Booz Allen’s strategy regardless of who is in the White House, he said.

“I have a bias to growth, so I look for things that are going to grow,” Crowe said. “IT modernization will be a driver and catalyst of change.”

The concept of migrating systems and applications to the cloud will be a big part of that strategy. While that is not a new concepts, there is still a lot to be done.

“Once you start migrating to the cloud, then you’re in a better position to organize your data and use your data in ways that you haven’t been able to before,” Crowe said. “Once you have your data more readily available and assembled, then you can start thinking about things like automation.”

Data modernization is the next wave in government efficiency because it will enable greater use of artificial intelligence which will enable automation, according to Crowe.

Through acquisitions and internal investments, Booz Allen has become a major provider of AI in the federal market. The company has built complementary practices around the cloud, digital transformation, and AI.

Booz Allen is also three years into its VoLT strategy – an acronym of Velocity, Leadership and Technology.

“It has crystalized our culture and how we are a digital disruptor in this space, and how we think about problem solving,” Crowe said. “We’re thinking about the problems of efficiency and how to apply technology to existing conditions that even five years ago, you couldn’t solve.”

One example is a Veterans Affairs Department project, where Booz Allen partnered with Amazon Web Services to implement a tech search capability for helping adjudicate benefits faster. Tech search uses AI and other tools to quickly scan and analyze large volumes of data in documents, such as PDFs and other file types.

“These files can cover a veteran’s entire career. It can be hundreds and hundreds of static pages,” Crowe said. “We’re able to do tech searching and save literally hundreds of hours.”

The result is a quicker process that yields better results.

“Think about being able to search a 1,300-page PDF and you start finding things that you need to find to validate a claim,” Crowe said. “That’s a game changer for the adjudicator and think about the impact for the veteran.”

One big piece of Booz Allen's strategy is to work with global commercial technology providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce. But to stay on the disruptive edge, Booz Allen also has an active venture investment strategy that focuses on startups with promising technologies.

“We aren’t static and waiting for what the big guys can provide us, but we also have one of the most active venture funds in the industry,” Crowe said.

Booz Allen has made more than a dozen investments into companies whose solutions can be brought into customer challenges, he said.

One of those saw Booz Allen participate in a $33 million Series A round for Reality Defenders, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in spotting deep fakes.

Booz Allen is also one of several investors in Second Front Systems, a developer of a cloud-based software for national security programs.

“I think it’s a strategic asset for us to have a corporate venture fund getting us into what’s next from a technology standpoint,” Crowe said.

Booz Allen wants to be on the leading edge of disruptive technologies because eventually those tools will become the norm, Crowe said.

AI is one of those areas where he wants the company to continue developing deep expertise.

“I want more of our workforce to not only be fluent in AI as a user, but to be leaders, driving mission outcomes for our clients,” he said.

As Crowe sees it, the key is to think of AI as more than just a tool but as a mission enabler.

“A lot of it is, are you asking the right questions to solve the problem? And if you ask the right questions that will lead to what data sets do you need to answer those questions,” Crowe said.

Under the VoLT strategy, Booz Allen’s pathway to success relies on matching its consulting heritage with the knowledge of emerging technologies.

“Getting an AI fluent workforce is not just about getting people who can train a large language model but being comfortable with these tools to solve problems that we were never able to address as quickly or as effectively before,” he said.