Page 70 - FCW, March/April 2020

2020 Federal 100
Paul R. Lawrence
Undersecretary for Benefits
Department of Veterans Affairs
Management by metrics. When Lawrence took over as undersecretary for benefits in mid-2018, the position had been vacant for more than two years. He quickly set performance goals for the eight lines of business in his portfolio, stressing collaboration, agile governance and transparency for both progress and setbacks. By the end of fiscal 2018, seven of the eight business lines had met or exceeded those targets, improving the veteran experience for claims, appeals, home loan guarantees and other benefits. And the VA’s overall trust score among veterans rose from 60 percent in 2016 to hit 90 percent by the end
of 2019.
Susan Lawrence
Managing Director
Accenture Federal Services
Bridging the human gap. The Defense Department increasingly demands innovation and best practices from the commercial sector, and Lawrence answered that call
by leading teams for two Air Force projects. One involved deploying enterprise IT as a service at six Air Force bases for the branch’s Compute and Store program, and the other was an ongoing modernization project
to consolidate human resource functions for 600,000 personnel
and their families into a single enterprise resource planning system. Both projects reflected Lawrence’s
commitment to using human-centered design principles that focus on how people interact with those systems from concept to implementation.
Naomi Lefkovitz
Senior Privacy Policy Adviser
National Institute of Standards and Technology
The steady hand. Lefkovitz was
the point person for NIST’s Privacy Framework, a companion to the Cybersecurity Framework and a guide for federal agencies and companies
in dealing with digital privacy issues. According to Ron Ross, a cybersecu- rity fellow at NIST, Lefkovitz leaves flash and hype at the door and instead focuses on stakeholders’ needs. Her efforts were essential to the Privacy Framework’s success. “I would char- acterize her as having a steady, quiet leadership quality and the ability to focus on an end goal and get the job done,” Ross said.
David Levy
Vice President, Federal Government
Amazon Web Services
Passion for innovation. Levy leads AWS’ federal, nonprofit and health care practices, which puts him at the forefront of several critical missions. He is passionate about moderniza- tion, transformation and best-in-class citizen services and has put those passions to use at the Census Bureau, where he and his team helped break down data silos and modernize the decennial census. They also lever- aged cloud technology in support of
research initiatives at NASA and are cutting costs and improving customer satisfaction at the General Services Administration. In addition, Levy leads the AWS Disaster Response Pro- gram, which brings cloud technolo- gies to bear during natural disasters and other crises.
Ellen Lord
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment
Defense Department
Reimagining acquisition. Since leaving her post as CEO of Textron Systems to enter government service, Lord has been working tirelessly to reform DOD’s acquisition system. She regularly engages with representa- tives of companies, trade associations and the media and holds technology- focused industry days to garner ideas on how to diversify the contractor base in areas such as drone technol- ogy. In 2019, Lord spearheaded major changes in defense acquisition, includ- ing revamping how the department evaluates and buys software through the Defense Innovation Board’s Soft- ware and Acquisition Practices Study, the Adaptive Acquisition Framework and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification standard for defense contracts.
Paul R. Lawrence Susan Lawrence Naomi Lefkovitz David Levy Ellen Lord
70 March/April 2020 FCW.COM