Leadership Voices With WWT's Bryan Thomas

Leadership Voices with WWT's Bryan Thomas

A Transformative Approach to Government Innovation

At WWT, we understand IT modernization is not business as usual. Government agencies are not just upgrading or replacing outdated software and hardware. They are looking for integrated solutions to transform their operations and drive their missions.

When agencies are interested in bringing together stakeholders and technology experts to find new solutions to long-standing problems — they need something more than the traditional reseller model. They need a collaborative environment for real innovation.

According to WWT's Senior Vice President to the Public Sector Bryan Thomas, this was the idea behind WWT's state-of-the-art Innovation Center, located in Washington, D.C.

The Innovation Center frequently hosts executive briefings, solution demonstrations, proofs of concept and product-benchmarking efforts. Through our ideation workshops, we help government customers to examine their biggest challenges and step through the entire lifecycle of innovation—from the generation of new ideas to forming strategic and tactical plans that lead to concrete outcomes.

The Innovation Center is virtually connected to WWT's Advanced Technology Center in St. Louis, MO, which serves as a testing and research lab that doubles as a collaborative ecosystem for employees, customers and partners. This is what makes WWT "Silicon Valley in St. Louis"—but we cannot achieve success through the use of tech alone.

Partnerships are essential to WWT's strategy, and we have staked our reputation in large part on our ability to help civilian and defense agencies tackle their most difficult-to-solve problems. This is one of WWT's core strengths.

Whatever technology field we enter, we are looking for technology-savvy companies that share our vision for innovation and collaboration—taking best-of-breed technology from different vendors and integrating a disjointed environment into a cohesive solution.

When there is a champion internally who really understands the vision and what they need to accomplish — and who can collaborate with industry to develop solutions — modernization moves so much more effectively. That innovative mindset, that shift in culture, is what makes transformation possible.

In the latest installment from GovExec's Leadership Voices series, Bryan shares his insight on how to take a transformative approach to government innovation.