Industry Interview: The SI Organization Inc.

GIF 2011 Volume 9: Issue: 8 (November/December)

 

Bill Graham leads a diverse business of over 2,000 employees, providing full life cycle, mission-focused systems engineering and integration capabilities to the U.S. intelligence community, Department of Defense and other agencies. The SI’s scalable systems engineering platform for modeling, simulation and analysis allows customers to baseline requirements, optimize resources and manage risk.

Q: The SI has existed for 40 years, but you recently celebrated your first anniversary as an independent company. What were some key milestones from the past year?

A: It’s been quite a year for the SI. We were divested by Lockheed Martin just over a year ago, and our evolution to an independent company was pretty smooth, thanks to the leadership of our transition teams. Most importantly, we accomplished this major change without impact to our customers, their missions and our employees.

During the year, we added more than 300 people, planted the seeds to grow in new markets, built the foundation for the broader SI brand, and won a number of important contracts that will enable us to continue delivering systems integration capabilities to critical national security missions.

Three months ago, we stood up our new cloud-based IT infrastructure and business platforms. This was a monumental task that included a simultaneous launch of our intranet, extranet, email, enterprise resource planning platform, benefits administration and payroll services. We managed every aspect of the transition with the same processes we use on program—we established the technical baseline and drove it to closure. Because we are leveraging a cloud solution, we are already seeing significant cost savings on IT operations and maintenance.

Q: How would you describe the culture at the SI?

A: We start teaching full life cycle systems engineering from an employee’s first assignment, and we want our people to grow as engineers and stay with us for their full career. One of the unique aspects of our culture is our process for greening and knowledge transfer. We’ve built a strong hiring pipeline to some of our nation’s best engineering schools. We use mentoring and knowledge transfer programs to immerse these young engineers in our culture and technical processes, and this greening effect in turn drives energy and innovation throughout our workforce.

Q: At the GEOINT 2011 Symposium, data-driven decision making seemed to be an important theme for the SI. What does this mean and how does it benefit your customers?

A: Our ability to enable data-driven decision making is a key discriminator for our business. Using proven modeling and simulation capabilities, we infuse hardcore analysis into the decision process to develop unbiased alternatives and recommendations with a full life cycle systems engineering and integration mindset. At the end of the day, it’s about giving customer decision-makers the data they need to make informed choices with a thorough understanding of the risks and impacts to their mission and resources.

Q: What solutions can the SI provide customers like NGA in an economic environment that has put pressure on budgets across the intelligence community?

A: We partner with our customers to help solve challenges like portfolio management, resource allocation and strategic planning. These are critical activities when budgets are under duress. When you’re trying to make decisions about which programs to cut or which assets to decommission, a trusted systems integrator can help support evaluation of the trade space, analyze customer mission outcomes, and provide solution alternatives to support decisions that are based on hard data.

Q: What does “partner of choice” mean to the SI?

A: Being a partner of choice starts with providing unparalleled support to our customers to ensure mission success, but it’s much more than that. It means we partner across industry to build the strongest, highest-performing technical teams that work well together and stay focused on the mission. We partner with universities and research labs to foster new ideas and innovate solutions for hard problems, and we partner with small businesses to find the best resources and help them grow and strengthen their businesses.

Q: We’ve heard the SI has an approach for modeling the effectiveness of a cloud computing infrastructure. Can you tell us more?

A: Our cloud effectiveness model was a popular demonstration during GEOINT. The framework is a patent-pending model that provides a quantitative way to determine how effectively a cloud offering meets a customer’s need. The model aligns with the recently published National Institute of Standards and Technology cloud standards, and we feel it has a number of valuable applications. Consumers can use the framework to evaluate different cloud solutions and tailor the model based on their priorities. Likewise, cloud providers can use the model to determine where to allocate resources to improve their overall effectiveness. ♦ 

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