“Morgan, quite frankly, has prepared me for the right trajectory in life.” — Kevin Hawkins, Class of 1988 By Eric Addison
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rowing up with his role model in Harwood, Md., was a big help in Kevin L. Hawkins’ career, but not quite in the way he once envisioned. “My dad owned a construction company, and so my suit in life was to have my own business like my dad,” he says. “But he didn’t want me to go into construction, so he sent me to Morgan.” Following those marching orders, and an interest he had developed working with computers in high school, Hawkins became one of the early graduates of Morgan’s bachelor’s degree program in information science and systems. It was 1988 – before the Internet and other modern-day technology staples had entered popular culture. Since then, his Morgan education, and his love of business, have taken him far. Hawkins is now a managing director and Government Industry leader for Protiviti Inc., a global business consulting and internal audit firm. His foresight, and fate, have put Hawkins at the center of some very big movements throughout his career. His first job after graduation from Morgan was with the federal government, auditing federal contracts involving information technology (IT) and other matters. A year later, he took a position with an obscure federal entity called the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). There, he soon found himself in a meeting, watching a demonstration of the next new thing: the World Wide Web.
“(The technology) was very immature (at that time),” he recalls. “Not long after that, I was very fortunate the IRS was interested in trying to figure out how to use the Internet.” Hawkins headed a team that developed an electronic filing system for the IRS, but e-filing was shelved when top administrators decided “the world wasn’t quite ready to do taxes online,” he recalls. “This was 1994.” In the end, the agency settled on posting its tax forms and publications online. “So the IRS brought a lot of things to the Internet, including the use of PDF,” he says, “and it was a program that I led.” The next year, Hawkins earned his M.S. in information systems from George Mason University. He also moved up at NTIS, becoming director of its FedWorld Office, and remained an innovator, playing an important role in the development of the federal government’s “public key infrastructure”: technology that made possible the use of the Internet for commerce and other secure transactions. The knowledge and skills he gained in that work became the foundation of the company he started in 2001, Enspier, which was recognized by MEA Magazine in 2006 as one of the nation’s fastestgrowing minority companies. That same year, Enspier was acquired by Protiviti. Hawkins has had great success in his career, excelling in “the little things,” as did his cousin, baseball great Maury Wills, he says.
“…There’s an aspect of his life that I like. He stole bases, and he never hit home runs,” Hawkins explains. “Sometimes folks are always trying to swing the big one, trying to get the big opportunity. And so much of life, to me, is about getting up every morning and trying to hit the single, doing the little things all the time. So that’s what I try to do: work on the little things. Then, the home runs? You’ll make it around, eventually.” A true Morgan alumnus, Hawkins believes in giving back, donating time and money to improve the welfare of others in local communities as well as abroad. He also gives generously to Morgan. He recently made a significant commitment to fund the Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management’s first endowed lectureship. In addition, he funded an endowed scholarship at the School of Business and Management and provided funds for the purchase of a rehearsal room piano for use by students in the Murphy Fine Arts Center. Hawkins credits Morgan with giving him “fundamental tools,” including skills in writing and critical thinking, in addition to his basic training in IT. “I’m 47 now. At some point…it’s hard to keep up with everyone technologically. And as you move into management, you have to then bring a different set of skills,” he says. “…Morgan, quite frankly, has prepared me for the right trajectory in life. It has prepared me for the whole journey. And I am very appreciative of that.”
MORGAN MAGAZINE VOLUME I 2014
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