by Peter High, published on Forbes
7-7-2015
In September of 2013, the Science Applications International Corporation, better known as SAIC, split into two companies. The services arm retained the name SAIC, and is a $4 billion technology integrator providing life cycle services and solutions in the technical, engineering, intelligence and enterprise information technology markets.
Bob Fecteau joined SAIC as CIO in early 2013. He did so after having spent time as a CIO at BAE Systems and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). He joined a company that served government agencies and the military, and he did so as someone who was deeply immersed in both worlds. He had the great challenge in the first few months of joining the company of helping to lead the separation of the two companies, ensuring that people, processes, and technologies were productive on behalf of clients all the while.
He has also helped create a fascinating model where IT talent is accessible and available to customers. If a customer has a need that can be filled by one of his staff, he may send them off to work with that customer for a period of time. If and when they come back to do internal IT work, they do so with a much broader perspective of what IT does for SAIC and its customers, and in the process can help generate new ideas on how IT can become a bigger contributor of value to the company and its customers.
Lastly, he has employed a servant-leader model for IT to ensure that, from top to bottom, people feel as though they have the resources and the tools they need.
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Peter High: You have a flexible labor pool that can be dedicated to IT work that is internal to SAIC one day and then customer facing the next. Can you describe this model?
Bob Fecteau: I’m responsible for ensuring that the labor pool in the IT shop internally is balanced with the service line labor pool that we offer to the government. So then if there is somebody that has a vacancy inside of the government or customer workspace, we can take an IT asset from my CIO office and push it into the service line, generate the revenue, and when the task is done, they can come back to the IT space. Conversely, if they have people coming off contracts supporting the customer and the contract ends early, we can take those assets and move them in the IT shop. They can help us do internal things until they get reassigned to the next contract. So that for us has been a real distinguishing change in how we implemented matrix support to the business.
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