Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Mr. Zepp holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems with a focus in Enterprise IT Architecture and is currently pursuing the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) certification track. He has over 18 years of applied experience as a Sr. Systems Engineer (SE) providing thought leadership, technology management consulting and task execution in support of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community (IC). Mr. Zepp served as a lead engineer on multiple key client applications and performed an array of engineering tasks that encompassed functional requirements gathering, workflow analysis, system design, testing, integration, deployment and sustainment lifecycle support, while mitigating risk and reducing cost by adhering to agile development, “NSA-way”, DoD C4ISR Architecture Framework (DoDAF) and Capability Maturity Model integrated (CMMi) best practices. Clarity Innovations is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) that was established in April 2011. Clarity is led by a team of cleared Executive Management and Technical professionals with over 30 years in the Intelligence Community (IC) and the commercial sector. Clarity’s business model focuses on small mission focused teams with the proper skill demographic (technical & analytic mix) to deliver impactful services and products to our clients at a competitive price point. The current target markets are within the Dept of Defense, IC, Special Operations community and law enforcement agencies.
Mr. Zepp currently serves as the President and CEO of Clarity Innovations LLC. In this role, he is charged with being the chief communicator, decision maker, leader and compliance manager charged to motivate employees and drives change within the organization. Along with the COO, Mr. Daniels, he presides over the organization’s day-to-day, month-to-month and year-to-year operations and is responsible for setting the strategic vision, culture and performance goals for the company. Mr. Zepp was hand selected to provide subject matter expertise as the IC Apps Mall (AML) and Ozone Widget Framework (OWF) ecosystem engineering lead, both programs are a Congressional mandate to open-source software under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) IC ITE initiative. His primary duty is to ensure that program objectives were focused on applying a wide array of open source technologies in order to deliver relevant mission capabilities to his customers. He partnered with Intelligence Community (IC) members and the Department of Defense (DoD) to gather and align functional requirements into strategic areas of ODNI’s IC ITE program. He also worked with dozens of mission elements across the IC to leverage best practices and technologies with the end state goal of better collaboration. Mr. Zepp worked alongside his mission counterparts and development teams to support an innovative and leading edge software development process focused on rapid prototype and component reuse. This methodology has proven to be highly successful and development teams have outpaced significantly larger development efforts, resulting in faster delivery of mission capability and at a reduced cost to the Government and the Tax Payer.
Mr. Zepp led RT-RG Test, Integration, Deployment and Sustainment (TiDS) data fidelity support and the adoption of smart data tagging/provenance efforts. He demonstrated a functional level of understanding of RT-RG collection systems, dataflow, pre/post processors, ingest, enrichment analytics and user interface suite. He participated in and led Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) to design new capabilities based upon evaluation of functional requirements and operational considerations for the cloud reference architecture. Mr. Zepp managed and ensured technical integrity of the system baseline by continually evaluating system performance and configuration management throughout the lifecycle. He provided technical engineering support to meet Quick Reaction Capability (QRC) requirements that encompassed system design, upgrade, modification, testing and deployment/sustainment activities.
Mr. Zepp ensured execution of the full systems engineering lifecycle that encompasses system architecture, requirements analysis, testing, integration, evaluation and operational transition activities of numerous client applications and product teams. He provided technical innovation and architecture-related thought leadership, strategic direction and long-term planning for DAYTONA application development and system integration support. He led the development and documentation of best operating practices associated with leading edge application design with emphasis on Question Focused Dataset (QFD) development and dataflow configuration efforts that spanned multiple Source Systems of Record (SSR) and collection systems. Mr. Zepp established a formal procedure for coordinating system migration activities across multiple teams through iterative architecture revisions and system level upgrades while maintaining full operational capability during system upgrades. He managed and worked closely with Sr. Software Engineers to maintain agile development practices that comply with Enterprise Architecture efforts that support enhanced knowledge management and information sharing initiatives on OZONE and ATMOSPHERE. In this capacity, he provided domain expertise to thoroughly assess system performance and reengineer existing system components in successive fashion to ensure intended system functionality, operation and performance. Mr. Zepp served as a technical steward on an Enterprise Architecture initiative aimed at achieving mission related objectives using transformational technologies like Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), virtualization, common component utilization and cloud computing. He supported the planning and test analysis required for the DAYTONA certification and accreditation process. Mr. Zepp articulated requirements and formulated justification for technical investments via cost-benefit analysis and estimates as requested.
Mr. Zepp was charged with the management of a team of engineers and SMEs to develop, execute, and evaluate systems and software engineering processes for the GREENDRAGON research and development (R&D) effort. He was responsible for providing recurring large-scale system requirements specification oversight and providing technical recommendations to ensure high system availability and mission success. He mapped analyst workflows and led system capabilities decomposition efforts for the purpose of identifying impact from legacy system decommissioning. In this capacity, Mr. Zepp supported the documentation of legacy system functions and Interface Control Documents (ICDs) to develop dependency diagrams that define dataflow, system level decomposition and use case analysis that are aligned with the new reference architecture. He planned verification efforts of new and unproven designs early in the development lifecycle to ensure compliance with established requirements. He led the discovery, testing/experimentation and integration of leading edge hardware and software-based technologies for rapid insertion from Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), Government off-the-shelf (GOTS) and Academia. He coordinated requirements from multiple consumers across the IC and conducted metric-based experimentation surrounding critical intelligence gaps, system design flaws and workflow/process improvement. Mr. Zepp guided system development and implementation planning through preparation of system engineering assessments, management plans and integration test plans. He reviewed results and evaluated design conformance and desired output results by way of an iterative and agile development cycle that aligned with an extremely dynamic mission domain.