It’s always good to celebrate an anniversary, as marking a milestone is the perfect time to reflect on achievements and set new goals. A year ago, on November 30th, 2015, our new company created from the merger of CSC and SRA, rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and on November 30th, 2016 our Integrated Technology Center (ITC) in Bossier City, Louisiana, became fully staffed and operational.
Creating a cross-functional, collaborative center for excellence to serve our federal customers at the highest level has been a critical part of CSRA leadership’s founding vision. Their idea was to take the company’s core values and enshrine them in every aspect of the ITC, from building design to the solutions created by our teams, to drive mission success for our federal customers.
While it’s typical for a company to express its vision in employee work values, how does a company express its values in building design? For CSRA, which has a clear and unified vision of its company values, it was less complicated than it sounds. As a company that supports federal government agencies in meeting their missions with next-generation solutions in areas from cybersecurity to digital services, we’re driven by the need to create innovative solutions that are born out of collaboration, encourage mobility, are unfailingly secure, and leverage open architecture; these terms apply equally to our solutions, our people, and our ITC.
When you walk into the Integrated Technology Center, you immediately notice that it is a mobile-friendly, work space that invites collaboration across technologies and teams, with few walls and a brightness and vibrancy that’s not often associated with a federal contractor. Without the physical partitions and structured seating, we’ve found application developers collaborating with cloud teams and network architects soliciting inputs from the security engineers before being called in to a formal architecture review meeting. And much like our solutions, our open and focused work space drives collaborative working relationships, while providing state of the art security features that meet the needs of our government customers, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the TSA, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Even the choice of location for our ITC in Bossier City is significant for us and those we serve. From the outside, the obvious location for our new facility should have been close to CSRA’s headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, just inside the Beltway and close to the seat of government and agency headquarters. However, with more federal agency jobs located outside of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, locating a new facility there was not a given. Moreover, when you factor in the costs of real estate and evaluate that in the context of the need for our federal customers to manage costs and drive budgetary efficiencies, then it was natural to look beyond the Beltway.
In total, we evaluated 134 sites across the country. Once we began working with the community of Bossier City, we knew we’d found our home. The community embodies the same collaborative spirit, drive for innovation, and embrace of agility, that we prize at CSRA. Our Cooperative Endeavor Agreement has created a partnership between the city, area universities, and our company. Together, we’ve invested in the revitalization of downtown and we’ve partnered with area colleges and universities, including Louisiana Technical University, Bossier Parish Community College, and Northwestern State University to provide internships to students and help guide curriculum based on practical experience and foster the next-generation of IT innovators.
From our leadership team to our newest employees in Bossier City we’re all very excited by the partnership we’ve started with Bossier City, and by the innovative solutions that are being created at the ITC. If this is what we’ve accomplished in our first year as CSRA, just wait and see what’s coming next!
Interested in learning more about opportunities to work with CSRA in Bossier City, Louisiana? You can learn more here.
