The systems engineering firm TASC, Inc., recently simplified its operating structure to more clearly define its market focus, reduce cost, and improve integration across the enterprise to enhance its capabilities and, in turn, better serve its customers, the company’s chief said in a recent interview.
The realignment was done in part to “rebuild the TASC culture” and reacquire its own identity following the divestiture from Northrop Grumman [NOC] two years ago, David Langstaff, president and CEO of TASC, told Defense Daily in an interview last month.
The new structure also provides the rare opportunity to “press restart” to better position TASC to “anticipate changes we see coming in the marketplace” to improve focus and better serve customers, Langstaff said. The realignment also is meant to break down silos within the company to better emphasize its core strengths and thought leadership across the enterprise, which in turn also boosts capabilities and helps customers, he said.
TASC’s new structure includes two primary operational groups, Intelligence, and Defense and Civil, which together account for about 90 percent of the company’s business. The company says that its business is about 60 percent with the intelligence community, 30 percent Defense Department and 10 percent civil.
A third group, Strategic Capabilities and Technology, also has profit and loss portfolios but also has responsibility for the company’s centers of excellence that cut across all of the businesses, Langstaff said. This group accounts for between 5 and 10 percent of TASC’s sales, but Langstaff said that more importantly it works with all of the company’s line organizations.
“It means that we don’t have great capability that is locked in certain business units, but we are now organized to pull those great capabilities across all business units and customers,” Langstaff said. The vision that we talk about with our [roughly] 5,000 employees is we want our employees to be able to reach across TASC with the capabilities that are necessary to solve the problems for our customers and not be stymied by internal structure or controls.”
A fourth group is Advanced Customer Solutions.
Previously, TASC was organized into four primary groups, Enterprise Systems, Mission Engineering, Intelligence Operations and National Systems, which were structured around specific capabilities and customers. Below these groups were 15 business units.
Under the new structure, the Intelligence and Defense and Civil Groups each have four business units and Langstaff said that overall TASC has eliminated about one-third of the business units. The new structure not only provides greater “clarity around markets” it streamlines management, which also reduces costs, which in turn improves the company’s competitiveness in terms of cost structure but also frees up resources to reinvest, particularly in the training and development of its core asset, its employees, he said.
“This is the time to make sure that they know we are investing in them going forward,” Langstaff said. “So this is part of being clear about strategy and knowing what’s going to differentiate you in the new market environment.”
The defense and intelligence markets are headed for a period of flat to declining growth, pressures that haven’t existed in the federal space for nearly 20 years, Langstaff said. Taking cost out of the business and changing the culture should enable TASC to be “more agile and responsive” to customers who “need smart, innovative, rapid, trusted partners they can turn to.”
Despite the headwinds, the national security market is “huge,” providing room for TASC to grow organically and to take market share from competitors, Langstaff said. However, it’s important to “know what you’re focusing on, which is to say that you say ‘yes’ to certain investments but also means you don’t go after everything.”
The areas of potential growth for TASC include cyber security, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, test and evaluation, modeling and simulation, and data analytics, Langstaff said. He also believes that demand is going to increase for TASC’s core expertise in systems engineering because in a tighter fiscal environment there will be more focus on the front-end design and architecture so that trade-offs around requirements, schedule, cost and risk are understood before “you push the start button on programs.”
Systems engineering is something “we kind of have gotten away from in the years of ample funding.”
It’s too difficult to know exactly how budgets will play out in the next couple of years given forthcoming national elections as well as the potential for very harsh cuts through sequestration, Langstaff said. It’s even more difficult to understand how the macro environment will affect specific customers, he said.