Meet Vincent

Vincent Simpson is a leader in Booz Allen’s global defense business driving next-generation technologies through the firm’s Digital Battlespace business. His primary focus is the development and implementation of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and electronic warfare (ISR/EW) in support of our global defense business.   

Since joining the firm, Vincent has been a program manager for high-risk, large-scale command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) programs. He led our delivery of strategy and solutions to improve Army infrastructure in enterprise IT and networking architectures. He has also defined alternative growth strategies to expand Booz Allen’s mission solution business. 

Before joining Booz Allen, Vincent spent 4 years in the telecommunications industry. He was a project manager with Tyco International in the R&D center for transcontinental underwater networks. Prior to that, he was a Department of Defense (DOD) civilian employee for 14 years, working for the U.S. Army in both acquisition and R&D for intelligence subsystems.

Vincent is a member of AFCEA and the Associations of Old Crows and a board member for the Harford County Library in Maryland.

Vincent has an M.S. in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a B.S. in engineering from Widener University, and is a certified project management professional.

How did you come to have the career you have? I started out as a government employee. I was an engineer by trade. When you’re in the government, you pretty much have to learn how to buy things, so you basically become a project manager. I found that I enjoyed the planning and the acquisition phase and became a very strong tester of back-end capabilities. When I came to Booz Allen, I reinvented my career a little bit. I went from being a project manager to being a developer. We started building products and I started managing those. As I stayed at Booz Allen, it just kept getting larger and larger.

What have been a couple of highlights of your career? I was recently program manager of one of the firm’s largest single award programs, the Enterprise Machine Learning, Analytics, and Persistent Services program. Supporting a critical mission, our work ensured the best technology solutions were made available. And early in my Booz Allen career, I built a system called Stargazer, which was a force protection system deployed early in the global war on terror against improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. You can map that back to saving soldiers’ lives.

What do you see as the three most pressing needs for DOD as a client right now? Innovation is needed so that they can take advantage of existing capabilities and do new things to address the changing threat. I think they have to figure out how to change acquisitions so they can take advantage of technology in a higher pace than they are right now.

How do you help your clients prepare for the future? We help them walk through alternative strategies to be able to build acquisition programs that can meet their needs going forward—particularly around long-term costs as you go through it. If you can reduce costs in the back end of a system, you then have more money to do other things going forward with it. We also help them take a look at emerging technologies. We assess whether those technologies could be easily implemented on the battlefield or taken advantage of as easy upgrades to existing capabilities and systems, so they can have the largest advantage and be able to take the largest leap forward when they’re doing new programs. We also help them connect to other people within the Defense Department that are doing similar work. Hopefully they all can share getting to a new capability.

Where do you see Booz Allen in the next 100 years? I see us moving into the space where we’re a solution provider. We’re able to bridge the gap between industry and military and provide those solutions faster than we have right now. I see Booz Allen helping to lead acquisition reform.