Deloitte: Solving Business Transformation Challenges

Deloitte has a strong foothold in U.S. government consulting, helping federal agencies strategize and improve their business processes. Roger Hill, principal, and Lisa Barrow, client relationship executive, discuss the services the firm provides the federal government.

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Deloitte has been a USGIF Organizational Member since 2010. The firm has a strong foothold in U.S. government consulting, helping federal agencies strategize and improve their business processes. Trajectory spoke with Roger Hill, principal, and Lisa Barrow, client relationship executive, to learn more about Deloitte and the services it provides the federal government.

What is Deloitte’s background?

Hill: Deloitte’s heritage is an accounting and auditing firm, but we’ve now become the largest global professional services firm in the world, functioning far beyond accounting and auditing. We have four primary functions: consulting, advisory, tax, and auditing. Our consulting business and federal practice has grown significantly over the years. We now have more than 7,000 dedicated professionals delivering in the federal marketplace and we’re No. 25 on Washington Technology’s “Top 100 List.” Last year we did roughly $1.3 billion in federal revenue. As a firm we have 165,000 employees and do more than U.S. $35 billion in revenue.

Who are Deloitte’s customers and what are your core capabilities?

Hill: We serve all 15 cabinet-level agencies, all branches of the U.S. armed forces, the majority of civilian, national security/intelligence agencies, healthcare organizations, and most of the major donor institutions around the world. In our federal business, we divide our customer set into four sectors. The first sector is the civilian sector, which includes organizations such as the Department of Agriculture, United States Postal Service, Department of Treasury and the General Services Administration. Our second sector is the health sector, which includes the Department of Health and Human Services, the Military Health System, and the Department of Veteran Affairs. The third sector is the defense sector, which includes the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the four military services. The fourth sector is the national security sector, which includes organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community.

We focus primarily on consultative services. Many of our customers historically thought of Deloitte solely as a provider of financial management services but we actually deliver a broad range of services in other areas including technology, human capital, strategy and operations, and business and technology risk. We focus on the transformation challenges our customers have and find opportunities for us to help them with innovation, technology, and improving business processes. We’re focused on transformation and continuous improvement versus the more standard ongoing operations and maintenance delivery activities.

Could you speak more about Deloitte’s ties to the national security sector?

Hill: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), for example, is a tremendously important client in our national security sector client portfolio. At NGA, we’re focused on their challenge sets around human capital, technology, and financial management including auditability. We also do a lot of work around customer segmentation, customer strategy, and how NGA can better interact with customers and understand their needs. Improved analytics are used to measure performance against strategy and mission and to solve complex problems in the way they execute as an agency. We bring a lot of solutions to help with the business of NGA and also bring to bear competencies and solutions to help the agency advance its ability to perform underlying missions.

Barrow: The U.S. intelligence community is striving to use the elasticity of the cloud and leverage a common infrastructure in the pursuit of the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) construct. The value derived will enable greater information sharing across the community and, in the long run, collapse duplicative investments. Deloitte continues to enable and accelerate this transformational journey for both our commercial and federal clients. In my conversations with CIO leadership across the IC, leveraging the cloud is not only critical, but a must to harness efficiencies and change the way we manage the enterprise. It is a cultural shift, and with this shift is the requirement to look at new ways to procure this enablement. The IC has taken this corporate approach to heart and we are seeing new and disruptive approaches in adjusting for this shift. The IC’s appetite for contracting is more clearly focused on buying value and impact versus the newest technology. Innovation is a consideration of this model, no doubt, but learning how to define value and impact in an acquisition is more the focus. Ultimately, their movement in this direction will encourage industry to better define their value in support of this new paradigm.

Hill: With [NGA] Director Cardillo’s priority to better leverage unclassified geospatial data, this is another area in which Deloitte can be significantly helpful. We have partnerships at a global and commercial scale where we can help the agency take better advantage of opportunities to fold unclassified geospatial information into its mission and best identify sources of information, partnerships, and make information available across multiple platforms.

What research and development initiatives is your organization pursuing?

Hill: We put a tremendous amount of investment on an annual basis into our research and development cells. We have a series of Deloitte centers related to certain types of challenges. We have a Deloitte center for health solutions, financial solutions, energy solutions, edge of technology, cyber risk solutions, corporate governance, regulatory strategies, and modeling and simulation. All of these centers work together to identify key challenges and trends in areas such as human capital and technology for the upcoming year. The centers are agnostic to the market and lean forward toward where their respective areas are going in the future. We also have the Deloitte Digital arena where we’re on the cutting edge of innovation related to digital services. We are also proud of Deloitte Greenhouse lab, which provides an immersive environment combining analytics, technology, behavioral methods, and expert facilitation for executives to transition to new roles and develop future strategies and key objectives.

Barrow: We are able to apply the innovative approaches used to transform our commercial clients’ environments, and leveraging these practices, investments, and lessons learned, help our IC clients adapt these accelerators to advance their own enterprise. Leveraging our innovation practice and centers of excellence, we propose the art of the possible for envisioning a future on their transformational journey.

What differentiates Deloitte from its competitors?

Hill: One of our primary differentiators is our strong commercial business/capabilities and global reach allowing us to provide points of view, insights and solutions to address the challenges faced by NGA and our other federal customers. With the advancement and disruption of technology continuing at an unprecedented pace, more than ever commercial insight is of value to the public sector at-large. Because of our scale and the broad set of services we provide, we are uniquely positioned to bring commercially predicated points of view to the federal government. Our business strategy also differentiates us. We’re here to be advisory in nature, to develop solutions, to take part in transformational programs, and to introduce new ways of improvement.

Photo Credit: Deloitte

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