Booz Allen Hamilton
| Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Private limited corporation |
| Founded | 1914 |
| Headquarters | McLean, Virginia, USA |
| Key people | Dr. Ralph Shrader, Chairman & CEO |
| Industry | Management Consulting |
| Products | Strategy Consulting Technology Consulting |
| Revenue | US$4 billion (FY2006) |
| Employees | about 19,000 |
| Website | www.boozallen.com |
Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., referred to as Booz Allen is one of the oldest strategy consulting firms in the world.[1] The firm formerly had two consulting divisions: WCB (Worldwide Commercial Business, also known as “The Commercial Side”) and WTB (Worldwide Technology Business, also known as “The Government Side”). These two divisions recently restructured into functional service lines (Strategy, Design, Transformation) and business units: Global Commercial Markets, Global Government Markets, Global Functional Capabilities, Global Integrated Markets, and Global Operations.[2]
Booz Allen is a private company with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia and over 100 offices on 6 continents. Dr. Ralph Shrader is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the firm — the seventh chairman since the firm's founding in 1914.
Booz Allen competes with strategy firms like McKinsey & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company to work with many leading corporations and global governments, agencies, NGOs, as well as nearly every part of the U.S. Government and military infrastructure, on contracts involving strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology.[3] The Global Government Markets unit (formerly WTB) primarily competes with SAIC, IBM, Accenture, and other systems integrators and defense contractors.
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., is incorporated in Delaware as a privately held corporation, wholly owned by its approximately 300 officers. The firm was once public in the 1970s [4] (Time magazine named it the most prestigious management firm in the world)[5], but the partners took the firm private again through one of the first management buyouts (MBO) to allow the firm to consider long-range investments that companies beholden to shareholders might not be able to make.[6] In 2006, the firm had 131,000 applicants and 1176 new jobs, which translates to less than 1 in 100 appplicants being hired.[7] Booz Allen has numerous geographic subsidiaries around the world, with a concentration in the United States, Europe, and the Far East, notably in the Middle East, Japan, Korea, and Greater China.
With ~18,000 employees on six continents, and double digit growth rates over the past seven years due primarily to growth in its public sector business, the firm generated annual total sales of over $4 billion in FY2007.[8] Booz Allen's notable intellectual business successes include the HBS-honored OrgDNA framework, the PERT management technique and the product lifecycle theory. It was also responsible for coining the phrase "supply chain management".[citation needed]
History
After graduating from Northwestern University in Illinois in 1914, Edwin G. Booz developed the business theory that companies would be more successful if they could call on someone outside their own organizations for expert, impartial advice.[9] This theory developed into a new profession — management consulting — and the firm that would bear his name, Booz Allen Hamilton. BAH history reveals that the historic firm was originally based in the city of Chicago, Illinois
Mr. Booz was soon joined by James L. Allen, who became a co-founder and the second named partner at the firm.
Booz Allen Hamilton has a longstanding relationship with federal intelligence agencies, with current and former employees including former Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey, former CIA employee Miles Copeland, Jr., and former NSA Director Mike McConnell, who is now the second Director of National Intelligence.
Competitors
Booz Allen Hamilton's top competitors include A.T. Kearney,
Booz Allen also competes with Accenture, IBM, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and other systems integrators and defense contractors in the government and technology consulting markets.
Notable current and former employees
Business
- Jonathan Black - Director, Corporate Affairs, University of Oxford
- Rohit Bhagat — Global Chief Operating Officer, Barclays Global Investors
- Chipper Boulas — Vice President of Corporate Strategy, eBay
- Jonathan S. Bush - founder of Athena Health
- Art Collins — Chairman and CEO, Medtronic, Inc.
- Tim Collins - founder of Ripplewood Holdings
- Edward Davies - Partner, Unisys Federal Systems
- Karen Fawcett - Director, Standard Chartered Bank Malaysia (2005-)
- Richard Gay - Senior Vice President, MTV Networks (2006-)
- Rhonda Germany — Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, Honeywell
- Gerry Horkan — Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.
- Paul Idzik — Chief Operating Officer, Barclays PLC
- Steve Isakowitz — Deputy Associate Administrator, NASA
- Ray Lane - President of Oracle Corporation and General Partner at Kleiner Perkins
- Indra Nooyi — President and CEO, PepsiCo
- Edward O'Hare - Assistant Commissioner, U.S. General Services Administration
- Stan Scoggins - Vice President, Universal Studios
- Deven Sharma - President, Standard & Poor's
Politics and public service
- Wendy Alexander - Member of the Scottish Parliament (1999-present)
- Keith R. Hall - Director, National Reconnaissance Office (1997-2001); formerly Executive Director for Intelligence Community Affairs
- Leonid Isakov - Federal Bureau of Investigation
- George E. Little - Media Relations, Central Intelligence Agency (2007-)
- John M. McConnell - Director of National Intelligence (2007-); formerly Director of the National Security Agency (1992-96); retired in 1996 as Vice Admiral, United States Navy
- Michael C. Mullen - Assistant Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
- Patrick Gorman - Assistant Deputy Director National Intelligence, Strategy, Plans, and Policy, ODNI
- Andrew Turnbull - Member, House of Lords (upper Parliament), United Kingdom (2005-); Head of British Civil Service (2002-2005)
- R. James Woolsey, Jr. - Director of Central Intelligence Agency (1993-95)
- Thomas S. Moorman Jr. - Commander, Air Force Space Command (1990-92); Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force (1994-1997)
- Dov Zakheim - U.S. government advisor
Other
- Olivia Goldsmith - author
- Patricia A. Morrissey - Commissioner, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (presidential appointee)
- Bruce Pasternack - President and CEO of Special Olympics International, on the board of trustees of Cooper Union and serves as a board member for BEA Systems and SYMYX Technologies as well. Also, was the author of Results and The Centerless Corporation, books on strategy and business.
Offices
Booz Allen's headquarters in is McLean, VA. The firm has offices in many U.S. states, with a concentration of offices in and around the Washington, D.C. area as a bulk of their clients (especially the U.S. government) are based in that area. Booz Allen also maintains offices in over 20 countries outside the U.S., including sites in Central & South America, Europe, the Near East, South Asia, East Asia & Oceania, and Australia and New Zealand.
Criticisms and Controversies
Booz Allen has been subject to some scrutiny related to its work with U.S. government defense and intelligence agencies, and to some its ex-government staff.
In 2006 at the request of the Article 29 Working Group, an advisory group to the European Commission (EC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) investigated the U.S. government's SWIFT surveillance program and Booz Allen's role therein. The ACLU and PI filed a memo at the end of their investigation which called into question the ethics and legality of a government contractor (in this case Booz Allen) acting as auditors of a government program, when that contractor is heavily involved with those same agencies on other contracts. The basic statement was that a conflict of interest may exist. Beyond that, the implication was also made that Booz Allen may be complicit in a program (electronic surveillance of SWIFT) that may be deemed illegal by the EC. The source article on the ACLU's website and the memo created from this investigation can be found here [10].
Another controversy related to some of the senior staff of Booz Allen (past and present) and related to its performance on some specific U.S. intelligence agency contracts was brought to light on 12 January 2007 in an interview conducted by Democracy Now! with Tim Shorrock[11], an independent investigative journalist, and separately in an article he wrote for the Salon online magazine [12]. Through investigation of Booz Allen employees, Shorrock asserts that there is a sort of revolving-door conflict of interest between Booz Allen and the U.S. government, and between multiple other contractors and the U.S. government in general. Regarding Booz Allen, Shorrock referred to such people as John M. McConnell, R. James Woolsey, Jr., and James R. Clapper, all of whom have gone back and forth between government and industry (Booz Allen in particular), and who may present the appearance that certain government contractors receive undue or unlawful business from the government, and that certain government contractors may exert undue or unlawful influence on government.
Shorrock further relates that Booz Allen was a sub-contractor with two programs at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), called Trailblazer and Pioneer Groundbreaker, and then asserts two statements: that these programs reveal that many contractors are involved in various intelligence programs of which the media and parts of U.S. Government have now questioned the legality; and that the apparent (assertion made by Shorrock) unsuccessful nature of the programs reveals a lack of competence by both NSA and Booz Allen.
A June 28, 2007 Washington Post article [13] related how a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contract with Booz Allen increased from $2 million to more than $70 million through two no-bid contracts, one occurring after the DHS's legal office had advised DHS not to continue the contract until after a review. A Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on the contract characterized it as not well-planned and lacking any measure for assuring valuable work would completed.
External links
Footnotes
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