Booz Allen defense chief says company has moved into more technology-centric work

By Marjorie Censer  / January 14, 2019

The head of Booz Allen Hamilton's defense business said the company has shifted its business into deeper technology work and now is seeking to position itself as a "solutions" provider.

In an interview with Inside Defense at Booz Allen's Rockville, MD, office, Karen Dahut, who took over the defense unit last year, said she was pleasantly surprised when she arrived.

"Our business has shifted into deeper technology, engineering, cyber, mission essential areas," Dahut said.

"The way that I think about [Booz Allen's work is] sort of arrayed against a continuum of everything from acquisition program management, design and consulting to architecture, engineering, solutions," she continued. "Our business over the past six years has shifted from being predominantly on the left side of that continuum to being over 50 percent on the middle and right side of that continuum."

Six years ago, more than 80 percent of Booz Allen's defense business was what Dahut described as "middle to left" of that continuum.

"When you think about what DOD buys, they will buy program management for acquisition programs, for technical programs and for the operations, they'll buy program management," she said of how she considers the continuum. "But then they actually also buy design, technical architectures, developing architectures that are then implementable into solutions, they buy weapon systems and platforms, they buy components of those weapon systems, whether it's cyber, cyberdefense, [artificial intelligence] or just major weapon systems, like bombers and shipboard weapon systems."

The defense business' strategy is "we want to be in the center of that continuum," Dahut added. "We're never going to be Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or BAE Systems, but we want to be in a position where we are helping DOD to modernize by tech insertion."

"When you think about tech insertion, it doesn't mean you're actually designing the new weapon system, but you are taking advantage of open architectures, you're taking advantage of new innovative technologies and adopting those into the weapon systems or making them part of the weapon systems so that they are more agile and more open," she said.

Dahut said Booz Allen is now seeking more work creating solutions -- meaning a combination of a product and a service.

"If we can truly play in this middle space of building architectures, we can build, for example, the space architecture that leverages AI," she said. "Doesn't mean we're going to ultimately build the space warfighting systems, but we could build the architecture that is then leveraged by those warfighting systems."

Solutions, she said, is "a very small percentage of our business today."

"We think it could be bigger," Dahut said. "We don't want to build platforms per se, but we do want to build AI solutions."