Executive Mosaic is honored to present Paul Dillahay, president and CEO of NCI Information Systems, as a recipient of the 2021 Wash100 Award, the most prestigious award in all of government contracting (GovCon).
This marks the third overall Wash100 Award for Dillahay and his second straight since 2020. For his previous 2020 Wash100 Award win, Dillahay was recognized for improving NCI’s artificial intelligence and information technology capabilities as well as growing NCI’s revenue and influence in the federal sector.
“Paul Dillahay is a heads up CEO that has transformed NCI into a robust enterprise wide IT solutions provider, while also financially securing the company and raising its now extensive technology profile to include artificial intelligence solutions for DoD as well as the intelligence and civilian agencies,” said Jim Garrettson, CEO of Executive Mosaic and founder of the Wash100 Award. “Paul has brought a wide array of industry experiences and produced an agile services and network solutions provider with great promise, which has earned him his third Wash100 Award.”
Under Dillahay’s leadership, NCI started the calendar year 2021 with the announcement of a potential $807 million task order from the General Services Administration (GSA). The company will help GSA’s office of digital infrastructure technologies transform information technology capabilities, provide a more flexible service delivery model and advance digital modernization efforts.
“This award represents our total commitment to helping the government achieve modernization and digital transformation at scale,” said Dillahay. “Modernizing GSA’s legacy infrastructure, technology and workforce will accelerate operational processes and create more efficient ways to serve the agency’s internal customers.”
NCI will support the agency’s IT strategy and adoption of artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning and other emerging technologies under the Digital Innovation for GSA Infrastructure Technologies task order.
“This GSA award announcement is a strong validation of our mission to empower the government workforce through the adoption of cutting-edge innovation and emerging technologies,” added Dillahay.
Under this task order, NCI will help GSA monitor AI application deployments using AI. FedScoop reported that the company’s Evolve Wall platform will provide real-time information about the lifecycle of AI deployments.
In an interview with ExecutiveBiz, Dillahay said Evolve Wall will provide transparency to the customer of the AI projects, implementations, return on investment and visibility into the overall AI lifecycle.
“We want to ensure that our Evolve Wall improves over time, so we have a module that monitors how the AI is learning, as well as evolving its knowledge. As we implement AI capabilities into GSA’s environment, we will monitor its impact on employees and the customer base. We’re really excited to be able to deploy that, and expect to do so early in the contract,” Dillahay told ExecutiveBiz.
With Dillahay holding the reins, NCI announced several contract awards in 2020, including a two-year, $89 million contract from Army Intelligence and Security Command to provide IT Fit-Out services for the secure admin operating facility at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
“In these times of rapidly evolving threat landscapes, the need for our customers to have immediate visibility of all current IT systems in one location is a critical part of ensuring continual operations for our nation’s defense mission,” Dillahay said of the contract.
“We are extremely proud to be supporting the Army INSCOM mission of enabling the right decisions at the right time, while collaborating with multiple agencies to defend our country.
In December 2020, NCI announced that it will help the Defense Health Agency (DHA) to upgrade wired and wireless local area networks at 24 military treatment facilities as part of a $28 million follow-on task order awarded under the Army’s Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-3 Services contract.
“This win is a pivotal piece of NCI’s business strategy to enhance our value-based, innovative solutions, while exploring opportunities to utilize our artificial intelligence and digital transformation technologies to deliver critical information assurance and unparalleled systems,” Dillahay said of the task order. “We look forward to continuing to deploy emerging tech capabilities in support of the treatment and well-being of our country’s warfighters.”
NCI also reached the achievement of Maturity Level 2 Version 2.0 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development and Services and entry into an academic partnership with Mercyhurst University to advance the company’s AI technology for the federal government.
“We’re excited to work with Mercyhurst University to further augment the NCI Empower AI platform,” Dillahay said. “As the public sector starts to embrace next-generation, innovative AI solutions, NCI stands ready to help our federal government customers bring these proven innovations to bear.”
When asked about what the company’s IT teams have carried out to advance adoption of AI and other emerging technologies and help empower the federal workforce, he said NCI forged exclusive partnerships with nontraditional companies that had innovative platforms and invested a lot of time on proof of concepts.
“So, 2019 and 2020 were years where we were responding to OTAs, developing customer use cases and delivering on proofs of concept. We’ve moved to the back end of that phase, and we are at a point where the technologies are proven out, and their applications to the federal government are understood,” Dillahay said.
“Now, it’s a matter of doing things that will lead to even greater success: respond competitively, propose prices effectively, differentiate our solutions and position ourselves for growth.”
Dillahay shared with ExecutiveBiz his goals to continue to drive growth for NCI heading into 2021.
“We want to transition as smoothly as possible on GSA DIGIT, and optimize the service delivery. As we step back and look at the rest of the portfolio, we will continue to drive adoption of our AI solutions to our existing customers,” he said.
“We will also work to identify new potential technology partners to bring into the portfolio. We plan to bid close to $2 billion of RFPs this year to continue to maintain our very strong win rate in 2021, which will facilitate and accelerate growth in the future,” Dillahay told ExecutiveBiz.
Executive Mosaic congratulates NCI and Dillahay on the third Wash100 Award win of his long federal career. His leadership to NCI and drive to move the company forward have also led to great contributions to the federal sector and helped improve the GovCon community as a whole.
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