I grew up in a sports-minded family and played college baseball on scholarship in the late 1990s. By participating in team sports, you learn about team chemistry, hard work, leadership, and resolving conflict. All these lessons are important in the business world and have helped shape the type of employee and leader I’ve become. Helping teams deliver—turning the impossible into the possible—inspires me every day.
Meet Mark
Senior Vice President
As former chief operating officer of Liberty IT Solutions, now part of Booz Allen, Mark Merz oversees client relationships and works with business development and operations to ensure seamless project management.
Mark has 23 years of IT management experience, with a strong focus on enterprise infrastructure modernization and agile development. His experience includes overseeing Liberty’s Agile Development Center of Excellence (ACE), helping drive digital transformation across the federal IT ecosystem by developing and delivering innovative applications and low-code/no-code solutions.
Mark has a particular interest in projects that help expand the reach of healthcare operations to the smallest of communities and to the homebound through telehealth and mobile solutions.
Prior to joining Liberty, Mark held numerous program leadership positions at Harris Corporation, a Fortune 500 international communications and IT company. During his tenure at Harris, Mark worked on projects for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Federal Aviation Administration. He also supported corporate strategy development for mergers and acquisitions, with a primary focus on the healthcare IT and cybersecurity markets.
Mark is a certified project management professional. He holds a B.S. and M.S. from the Florida Institute of Technology, as well as an M.B.A. from Purdue University.
What makes you excited to come to work every day? I have seen firsthand the difference we have made in the lives of veterans. One example is the Beneficiary Travel Self-Service System (BTSSS) project. In the past, veterans would need to stand in long lines and fill out several forms to get their transportation benefits. With the BTSSS system, they can submit claims online with the speed and accuracy today’s consumers expect. While this might seem like a small change, there are many more projects like it that are making a real difference—reminding us every day that lines of code change lives.
What is the most pressing need in government IT today? I believe we're at an important inflection point within the markets we serve. Government customers have come to expect the same level of service as consumers. We all want applications that improve our lives—tools that are secure, accurate, and available when we need them. Open-architecture application programming interfaces and low-code/no-code solutions can help us reach that goal. We built up to this moment at Liberty, and now we’re moving the mission forward at Booz Allen.
What inspires you about the work you do? When I first started working on VA projects, I had the opportunity to visit the surgical wing of a VA medical center. I was able to watch several procedures being performed, and I witnessed medical staff interacting with software our team had recently deployed. I could immediately see the time savings our solution achieved and was able to get positive feedback from the staff. Seeing the tangible difference we made left a lasting impression on me.
