DecisionPoint CEO Brian Flood on leading critical innovation and talent development | So Good News

In today’s technology-driven government contracting environment, innovation is a constant effort.

The most impactful innovation is driven not by the pressure to keep up, but by identifying the real problems that government faces and the ability to solve those problems with the right technology. Brian Floodfounder and CEO DecisionPoint.

In an interview with ExecutiveBiz, Flood shared that “success is not about the innovations we introduce into our environment, but about the results we can achieve using those innovations.” DecisionPoint’s CEO also discussed his strategy to deal with the persistent talent shortage, the core values ​​that make up the company’s culture, and his plan to drive expansion in a competitive market.

Read below for Brian Flood’s Executive Spotlight interview.

ExecutiveBiz: What are your strategic goals for the coming year? What do you hope to achieve and are there any new markets in the federal sector that you are eyeing?

Brian Flood: “We want to expand our centers of excellence. Core to our corporate DNA is our entire lifecycle and portfolio of cloud services, primarily transitioning environments and enterprises to a fully cloud operating environment.

We have such capabilities in cyber areas – insider threat, insider threat, threat intelligence, offensive and defensive cyber operations. Then IT Service Management, meaning end-user support, application development and support, and anything in the IT Service Management and Enablement space.

We really want to be deeper and broader in our centers of excellence, so we excel in these areas of focus. We want to expand the loophole to include the ability to support mission-critical requirements across the Department of Defense, various civilian agencies, and even the intelligence community. We will build on the successes in our current centers of excellence and extend them to new capabilities that we can deliver to transform our clients’ ability to fulfill their missions.”

ExecutiveBiz: Company culture is very important, especially in today’s competitive hiring environment. Can you talk about the core values ​​that are important to DecisionPoint? How has your team developed the ability to succeed in today’s competitive market?

Flood said: “When I started the company 12 years ago, I wanted to create an environment that I wanted to be a part of as an employee. I wanted to create an environment where people could learn, grow and fulfill their professional and personal goals without having to change companies. To a large extent, we did.

It was based on the idea that I wanted to work with people who wanted to be a part of something bigger than themselves, who wanted to serve the greater good. We want people with a strong desire to earn more money, be more productive, achieve success and contribute to the company’s success.

Magical things happen when we are surrounded by people who care not only about their own professional success and achievement, but also about their peers, colleagues, superiors, subordinates, customers, and communities. It’s not one plus one equals two, but one plus one equals four or five.

This is the culture we are embedded in at DecisionPoint. We’re not perfect, but I think we have people who care about others, who care about the mission of our customers, and who empower others to do their best.

A company of our size has limited resources and we are completely dependent on each other for our overall success. Because we are so interconnected, a culture of contribution, a team of servant leaders and a desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves are essential to the goals we are trying to achieve.”

ExecutiveBiz: Expanding on the workforce issue, can you talk about how the hiring landscape has changed in recent years? What do you consider in your talent attraction and retention strategy?

Flood: “Covid has changed our world and it has completely changed the way people think about where work fits into their lives. There’s a lot of evidence that people have changed their priorities about how they live their lives, the impact that work has on their lives, and the sacrifices they’re willing or no longer willing to make. adapting life to work. They want to fit work into their life.

I don’t believe we will ever return to some of the cultural realities that existed before COVID. This is evidenced by how people change jobs, the decisions people make and their priorities in accepting jobs.

We need to be able to demonstrate to our workforce that we have a clear culture and investment in their well-being, not just professionally through pay and benefits, but also recognizing that they have priorities outside of work that we respect. and support.

That’s how you attract, hire, train and retain a labor market that’s much different than it was before March 2020, when COVID took over all of our lives.”

ExecutiveBiz: We often discuss innovation from a technical or feature perspective. What specific challenges do you see on the business side of innovation that aren’t sufficiently addressed or discussed?

Flood: “Technological innovation is almost limitless in our market. The challenge lies in understanding the customer’s mission well enough to know which innovations will drive improvement and improvement, and which innovations will create risk or conflict.

Innovation for innovation’s sake has never been our goal. Our goal is to empower our customers to fulfill their missions.

An account that we often look at in the marketing of innovation is that innovation is an improvement on the whole. From my perspective as a non-technical person, it’s not about the innovations we bring to our environment, it’s about the results we can achieve by applying those innovations. If we don’t make the task, customer, team, bureau, or agency better at what it does, innovation is a waste of time, effort, and money.

The only way we, as government contractors, know what innovations are of the highest value is to understand the customer’s mission requirements so intimately and integrally that we bring them only the innovations that impact their mission. It’s hard to do that because you have to be completely consistent with understanding how the customer views their mission and priorities.”