This year we have been working to deliver a “CPO Rising Virtual Roundtable” series, sponsored by IBM. Each of the roundtables brings together three or four leading Chief Procurement Officers to discuss a specific topic in depth and share their insights, experiences, plans, and recommendations. In each of these, I serve as host and moderator (click link to listen).
CPO Rising will publish a profile series of those Chief Procurement Officers who have and will participate in our Roundtable series. Today, we begin that series with a profile of Dr. Nick Nayak, Ph.D., who just a few weeks ago resigned after serving almost 4 years as the Chief Procurement Officer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was the longest sitting Chief Procurement Officer in DHS history and there were several news articles describing his leadership and tenure as highly effective and positive. Many in industry commented that he was a thought leader in bringing government and industry closer together.
In many ways, Dr. Nayak is the quintessential procurement professional in that he didn’t plan on a career in procurement, or pursue an education tailored for it. Like many of us, he sort of fell into it. The son of Indian immigrants and the first in his family to be born in the United States, Dr. Nayak got his start in the business world by joining his family business. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics from the University of Maryland-College Park in 1986. Looking back on how he got into procurement, Dr. Nayak admits, “I never really was thinking of this field, because back then there was no education that lined up with the career field. Today, there actually is, but there are very few kids who go to college thinking, ‘I’m going to go into procurement.’ They may think about business or supply chain management. Usually it’s a general business major who somehow finds their way into procurement.”
After college, Dr. Nayak applied to more than 80 companies, and turned down offers to join insurance companies and banks before taking a job as a contract administrator. For four years, he worked eighty-hour weeks, turning out contract after contract for the business development units at two federal contractors. During this time, Dr. Nayak earned a Master of Science in Management from the Florida Institute of Technology. He also began eyeing the public sector, after his father, a scientist, suggesting going to work for the National Science Foundation.
After four years in the private sector, Dr. Nayak began his long and successful career in public service as a Grant and Contract Specialist at the National Science Foundation. He quickly moved on to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at a time when the IRS was about to undergo their Tax Systems Modernization program, but lacked the procurement infrastructure to deploy the necessary technology. As a result, Dr. Nayak joined the IRS at a time of significant growth and investment for the procurement department, which grew from 50 to 500 personnel. Beginning in 1992 and continuing through late 2006, Dr. Nayak served as the Chief Learning Officer at IRS, wherein he built IRS’s flagship training program, the Treasury Acquisition Institute, and grew it to train over 100,000 acquisition (procurement) professionals at 17 other federal agencies and across all three branches of the federal government.
During this time, Dr. Nayak earned his Ph.D. in Administration and Management from Walden University, began teaching graduate and undergraduate business courses at four universities, and joined the federal government’s Senior Executive Service (SES), the first IRS procurement official to do so. After briefly leaving federal service to pursue a family business venture, Dr. Nayak returned to the IRS as the Director of the Office of Strategic Acquisition. He then went on to become the Deputy Director of the Office of Information Technology Acquisition, and then the Deputy Director for the Office of Procurement, where he oversaw roughly $2 billion in purchasing at the IRS.
In October 2010, Dr. Nayak left the IRS to join DHS as their Chief Procurement Officer. “I went there for a longer commute and less money,” Dr. Nayak admits. But he took the job out of gratitude for what he was able to accomplish as the son of immigrants “who came here with five dollars [in their pockets] and lived the American dream.” and would become the longest serving and most successful CPO in the history of the Department. With a $60 billion budget and 240,000 employees worldwide, DHS is the third largest federal department and the largest combined number of federal law enforcement officers. It was a “gargantuan job,” says Dr. Nayak, who oversaw more than 1,400 acquisition/procurement officers across nine agencies who were spending $18 billion on materials to protect the American people at the best cost to fulfill their mission.
“At DHS, you can actually see my mark there because I created a strategic plan. It was the first ever strategic plan for the community. It’s out on the internet, and I promised everybody that we’d have an annual progress report against it. It would do basically two things: it would say, ‘this is how we did it in plain English for any American tax payer to see: we procured goods and services to protect the country; and to you, the 1400 procurement people, here are our priorities, initiatives, and metrics for the next year. And, we will recognize all of you who are helping to push these metrics in the right direction.’”
After three years and nine months, Dr. Nayak decided to leave DHS and start his own consulting company, where he will advise companies of all sizes that would like to contract with the government. “I’m only going to take clients that I feel have something worthwhile to offer to government,” says Dr. Nayak, who even in his return to the private sector, still carries that public sector commitment to the tax payers.
Summing up his career and business ethic, Dr. Nayak believes that “if there was sort of a success attribute it would be that I grew up in business. So I bring a business mind to everything that I do, just like when I started the Training Institute to train all these procurement folks. It was really just about offering quality services at a great price, and then proving the results of the training – that is sort of the model.”
In part two of our profile on Nick, we’ll take a closer look at DHS and its enterprise procurement structure, including its agencies, mission, and priorities. We’ll also examine the unique challenges associated with not just how procurement is run at DHS, but also how it’s run in the public sector procurement. We’ll conclude the DHS portion of this series with an examination of the impact that Dr. Nayak has made at DHS.
RELATED ARTICLES
Announcing The 2014 Chief Procurement Officer (“CPO”) Virtual Roundtable Series
Becoming a CPO in 2014 – The CPO’s Perspective
The Role of CPO Remains a Work in Progress
