The CTO's role in how CACI shifted to tech solutions

Glenn Kurowski, who is retiring after a decade as CACI's CTO, talks about how the company has evolved over the last 10 years.

Glenn Kurowski, who is retiring after a decade as CACI's CTO, talks about how the company has evolved over the last 10 years. Courtesy of CACI International.

Find opportunities — and win them.

Glenn Kurowski, who is retiring as CACI International's chief technology officer, reflects on how partnerships and talent development helped transform the company's culture.

Glenn Kurowski talks so enthusiastically about technology and trends in the federal market, that it’s hard to believe that our interview took place on his last day as chief technology officer at CACI International.

Kurowski has been in that role for 10 years and played a pivotal role in the CACI’s transformation from a services-centric company, to more of a technology and solutions provider. During that time, the role of the CTO has grown at the company as well.

“Technology has become inherent in everything we do, and you need to acknowledge that in the C-suite,” Kurwoski told us. “The CTO also has to wear a business hat more so than they ever did in the past.”

In other words, the CTO must connect technology with business needs.

“The morphing of the CTO into being able to understand the business and put technology decisions in places, that’s where the role is headed,” he said.

At CACI, that has meant the CTO team has played a role in developing a talent pipeline.

“What do we need to do to position the company to always have the right technical talent to move our customers forward? And part of that answer is our intern program,” Kurowski said.

Each year, the company has at least 300 interns from various colleges and universities.

“We are constantly getting a really good crop of the next generation talent and future thinkers, and we’re developing with the university pipelines in areas that the kids don’t naturally go into,” he said.

Not many college students are interested in digital signal processing from the start, for example. The interest tends toward robotics and green engineering.

“But if you can work with the university to give the kids a chance to see what (radio frequency) and electromagnetic spectrum means, they suddenly realize that this phone they have on their desk talks like 20 different waveforms and that’s how it actually works. They find that’s kind of interesting,” he said.

A second initiative Kurowski spearheaded at CACI was developing the company’s partnering strategy, which is built around 11 relationships.

“It’s not a big number for an $8 billion company, but we’re looking to do things with our partners that are very, very deep,” he said.

CACI manages these relationships in the C-suite, not in the business development organization. That is a key distinction in Kurowski’s mind.

The partnership with Amazon Web Services has been in place for years, he said.

“We sat down and talked about their objectives and our objectives very transparently,” he said. “We were the first to get a strategic collaboration agreement in the public sector with them. That’s them investing in us.”

The two companies work closely together on go-to-market strategies and how to leverage AWS training to grow CACI’s workforce.

“One reason we are a powerhouse in cloud migration and development in the cloud is because of that partnership.”

The partnership has particularly borne fruit in the intelligence community, where AWS is the largest cloud provider.

“We have a large intelligence portfolio and we’ve done some amazing things together to build very scalable and secure applications in that environment,” Kurowski said.

A more recent partnership is with GitLab, the provider of a DevSecOps-based platform for software development. CACI became GitLab’s first federal systems integrator partner in 2021.

“We have contributed code that is in their commercial offering now. That’s how tight the partnership is,” he said. “We have early access to their code, and we have access to their developers. We’re able to lay out the kinds of things we do at scale in public sector, and they listen.”

CACI’s other strategic partners include Microsoft, ServiceNow, Juniper, Elastic, Splunk, UiPath, Intel, Red Hat and DataBricks.

“If you go down that list, you’ll find AI, data analytics, software development, the cloud. You’ll find all the major areas of disruption,” he said.

The technology partnerships and the intern program are part of CACI’s strategy to “invest ahead of need.”

It’s an approach launched by CACI CEO John Mengucci, who recruited Kurowski away from Lockheed Martin after 29 years there.

Kurowski was reluctant to make the move at first, because CACI was a services company.

“I didn’t feel the connection,” he said.

But Mengucci convinced him that he wanted to take CACI in a new direction.

“He said, 'Glenn, I want you to come help me drive the company to be a blend of expertise and technology, and that’s what we’ve done,'” Kurowski recalled.

But the moves the company has made including multiple acquisitions were not a reaction to tech trends.

“We focused on the market, and we focused on what the customer needs and then we invest ahead of that need,” he said. “It’s the fabric of how we operate, and it changes the mentality of folks in the company to be looking downstream at what the customer need is.”

Kurowski’s decision to retire is not a sudden one. The transition to CACI's new CTO Jason Bales has been in the works for some time.

“We all have succession plans,” Kurowski said.

Kurowski and Mengucci had Bales, a CACI employee since 2017, in mind long before they approached him.

“We put Jason shoulder to shoulder with me on so many different things and he didn’t know, but we could see him in action,” Kurowski said. “He’s going to be CTO 2.0, bigger, better, faster, smarter. We’re not going to miss a beat.”