One contractor brings technology innovation through the 'sticky note' approach
Posted by Federal News Network on July 2, 2019:
Bryan Thomas, the senior vice president for public sector at World Wide Technology, sat down with executive editor Jason Miller at Federal News Network's studios in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Here are some excerpts from that discussion.
State of the federal market
JM: Is it a good time to be a federal contractor?
BT: I've been in this space for about 19 years now, at Worldwide specifically, and I can't tell you a better time to be a federal contractor or even in public sector. That complexity in the market, as it relates to technology and really the people to get toward successful outcomes for customers, is happening more today than maybe ever before.
Today more than ever, I think technology innovation has evolved into a place that the consumption of that is now available for the government more so than it has been before. A lot of these newer, bleeding technologies were not proven in the marketplace. So the commercial organizations and telecommunication companies have moved first to things like cloud and different transformational security outcomes, Internet of Things and other things. That has given the government a really good basis of understanding of what the art of possibility is. So today in the federal contract space, we have a great use case scenario in the market that allows us to move much faster than we had before.
The innovation game
JM: What are you seeing from the gamification or the ideation piece to really promote innovation in agencies?
BT: I think the biggest innovation is the culture shift. So if you think about your business practice every day, it shouldn't take an application, a security workshop or a security objective to do gamification ideation. You should do it to determine how do you objectively move your business in the right direction? How do you think differently? How do you communicate? At the end of the day, potentially the smartest person in the room during a conference may not say anything because they'd been talked over for a long period of time. Ideation gives them our world in sticky notes, right? And they get to write their objectives down and then provide that data to the room. Then, that could be a really good idea that can apply to the next generation thought process. This whole idea around diversity inclusion and keeping everything and everybody at the top of mind, that's the culture shift that companies need to go through. And I think the federal government does as well. There's a lot of extremely smart people that have a great number of ideas. It's how do we take those ideas and put them into workshop action groups to help customers.