Tria Federal launched Tria Labs, our new technology innovation group, in August 2024. We sat down recently with Chief Technology Officer John Cho to learn more.
Q: What was the motivation behind Tria Labs?
A: Tria Labs is a way for Tria to demonstrate thought leadership. We wanted to find a tangible way to bring tough problems out of the government into a place where we could really incubate solutions for them. Through Tria Labs, our best and brightest are focused on solving hard problems.
Q: Can you bring us up to speed on the latest developments?
A: We’ve laid out part of our headquarters with collaboration areas and tools to enable design thinking and problem solving. But Tria Labs really lives in the cloud. We’re building infrastructure, we’re designing a series of sandboxes that are focused on different domains like cybersecurity, machine learning, data engineering and automation. These are fungible infrastructures that we can bring up and bring down at a moment’s notice. We’re looking to bring in the right kinds of expertise and tools to start building stuff – people who know the tooling, know the problems, and know how to marry them up to try and solve those problems.
Q: Could you talk about rapid prototyping and why it’s important?
A: We believe the government wants us to move fast – not to go through an elongated design and engineering process. This means creating a higher velocity set of processes without the heavy governance. We can explore a solution or an emerging technology in an entrepreneurial way, quickly determining if we want to spend more time investing in developing it or need to move on.
Rapid prototyping is a better use of our time in solving these harder problems. The alternative would be spending too much time on a technology or solution. The way things are moving within the industry, it’s such a high speed of development that it makes no sense to dwell on a technology or solution unless we know for sure this really is going to make a difference.
Q: Why is lightweight productized solution development vital to Tria Labs?
A: Like many companies around the DC metro area, we support the government. If we’re going to build solutions for the government, we need to take a page out of product companies’ playbooks. We want to take our solutions and productize them – really treat them like products. We want to ensure that the right kinds of features are included, but we don’t want to overengineer it. Think made-to-order.
For the government to make great decisions, we need to move fast enough where they can see how these emerging solutions can meet their needs. We want to productize our solutions in a manner where we have a backlog of features that we want to incorporate.
We also want to test it against what the government is saying: “Yes, this is absolutely spot on,” or “Could you change directions? That’s not quite what we’re looking for” – and be able to turn on a dime.
Q: Can you walk us through Tria Labs’ new IRAD process?
A: IRAD means independent or internal research and development. It’s work that a company does internally to try and develop capability around something that is going to bring value to the government. It’s an R&D effort that’s not funded by the government; we do it on our own in anticipation of what we believe the government is going to want. For us, IRAD is a lightweight, entrepreneurial effort to solve a hard problem.
We established success criteria that’s anchored in industry trends as they intersect with government needs. We ask ourselves: how do we solve some of these problems, these government needs, with technologies and services that we have available to us? Tria Labs then brings in multidisciplinary teams that could be a mix of consultants, engineers and scientists.
We try to understand: how can we build a minimum viable product to validate that this solution has real value? We want to start there and not really go further than that with an IRAD because we don’t want to spend too much time on something that may end up being either not important to the government or too expensive.
We push forward with building a concept of the solution, validate our thesis around that solution and send it on to the next level to see if Tria should invest further and build out something at a production scale. Or maybe we hold back because the timing isn’t right. Or it’s a great idea that’s not a great fit for us.
Q: How does Tria Labs strengthen the company’s thought leadership?
A: We want to showcase and share not just things that we’ve been successful on, but where we’ve come up short: here’s what didn’t work for the following reasons. Now we know why, and here’s how we can improve on that.
I think our findings will help colleagues of ours, other companies and even the government.
Q: How is Tria Labs encouraging intrapreneurship?
A: Intrepreneurship is a play on words with entrepreneurship. I know a lot of folks in our industry may not have much exposure to startups or entrepreneurship, which is all about going out there and starting new businesses. But we believe we can do those same sorts of things inside of business. You can grow new capabilities, new solutions, new products inside of a company.
We say “intrepreneurship” because we believe that people can be just as entrepreneurial inside Tria. It means teaching our top consultants, engineers and scientists how to work in a multidisciplinary setting, how to work fast in a timebound situation, how to self-analyze and be introspective about whether progress is being made against the success criteria we set forth. And being able to deal with adversity. If we have to fail, we fail fast. But how do we learn faster?
I think this is important if we want to ideate and serve the government with compelling solutions going forward. We’re going to build that into our cadence or our rhythm as a company.
Q: How is Tria Labs encouraging intrapreneurship?
A: Solving the bigger problems is going to require teaming up with both the government and the private sector, from D.C. to Silicon Valley. We’re also a big believer in execution. While Tria has many great strengths, other companies have other strengths that complement ours. To make a solution really come alive, we’re going to have to work with those folks as well as the government.
Q: How are you deciding who to partner with for Tria Labs?
A: We’re currently in negotiations with a number of small and large companies, including technology vendors whose names you’ll know. We’re intentionally working with startups that provide cutting-edge technologies that are a great fit for some of the solutions that we’re trying to create for the government. We are really excited about these developments. Stay tuned!
Learn more: Tria Federal Launches Technology Innovation Group, Tria Labs