In September 2023, John Steckel was appointed to lead AMERICAN SYSTEMS as the company’s CEO and president. Steckel recently sat down with Executive Mosaic to talk about the state of the government contracting market, share his thoughts on his new role and provide insight into how AMERICAN SYSTEMS is enhancing its capabilities.
Read below for John Steckel’s full Executive Spotlight interview.
John, to set the scene for our conversation, can you give us an overview of the GovCon landscape today? What trends and factors are moving the market and influencing companies in this space?
I think one way to summarize our market landscape is that it’s ‘evolving.’ From a macroeconomic point of view, the ongoing uncertainty in our customers’ budgeting processes, exacerbated by the current political environment and this being an election year, makes it much harder to understand where our customers’ budgeting priorities are. That said, I feel the government is continuing its digital transformation journey with different agencies transforming at different speeds. Technologies like AI/ML, modeling & simulation, high-powered computing and others are being worked into all aspects of our customers’ missions from an enterprise level all the way down to the tactical level.
One thing that is interesting to me is the fact that the technologies around enabling capabilities like DevSecOps, digital engineering, cloud and zero trust architectures — while cutting-edge — are now almost table-stake capabilities for competing in our marketspace. Compounding all of this is the pressure both industry and our customers are experiencing around recruiting and retaining people with the skill sets necessary to drive digital transformation. Overarching all of this are changes in our regulatory environment around cyber security, small business requirements, environmental reporting, you name it; it just adds more complexity to our marketspace.
But, even with all these forces at play in our marketspace, it creates exciting market opportunities for AMERICAN SYSTEMS.
I know you were recently elevated to President and CEO of AMERICAN SYSTEMS — congratulations! What can you tell us about your strategy and your vision for the future of the company?
I feel very honored and humbled to have been appointed AMERICAN SYSTEMS’ president and CEO by our Board of Directors, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to serve my fellow employee-owners as we embark on the next chapter of our company’s growth. Over the next few years, we plan on continuing our journey as a market-leading mission essential and information engineering services company that leverages the power of our employee-owners to not only drive value for our customers, but also drive value into our ESOP. How we look to do this is exciting to me.
Since I’ve ‘grown up’ in the industry in both product- and service-oriented companies, I’ve always felt integrating the strengths each type of organization brings could provide customers immense value from both an efficiency and effectiveness point of view. We will continue to integrate cutting-edge technologies, processes and approaches in both our customer-centric solutions and our internal processes to reduce cost, increase speed of service and ultimately help our customers deliver their missions more effectively and efficiently.
Where are you seeing opportunities for expansion in AMERICAN SYSTEMS’ portfolio? What new capabilities or markets are you eyeing?
One of the strengths and tenets of AMERICAN SYSTEMS’ success is our focus on what we call National Priority Programs, or programs that are essential to our country’s success. Keeping that in mind, we are continuously expanding into markets and applying cutting-edge capabilities that are a priority for our country.
As an engineering and IT services company, how is AMERICAN SYSTEMS embracing emerging technologies to elevate its offerings to federal customers?
An exciting aspect of our work at AMERICAN SYSTEMS is how we are leveraging technologies to drive value to our customers and their missions. For example, we’ve been applying digital engineering principles across many of our programs through use of models and technology integration to speed development cycles and reduce costs. We’ve developed and used predictive analytics (now called AI/ML) and have harvested mission data on multiple programs giving our customers higher levels of situational awareness and enabling more strategic decision making. We’ve implemented large language models similar to ChatGPT within our own operations and are working to offer similar capabilities across our existing programs. We’ve been on the cutting edge of applying cybersecurity capabilities across enterprise, operational and tactical systems including unmanned and autonomous platforms.
We plan to continue this trend of not just talking about embracing emerging technologies but also applying them where it makes sense within our company and for our customers to promote more efficient and effective operations.
