THE SYSTEM WAS BIGGER THAN THE ORG CHART.

SEAMLS

On day one, I became the director of SEAMLS at Gunter Annex.

The numbers were hard to ignore.

More than $500 million in enterprise software.

More than 500,000 users.

Hundreds of mission-critical databases and enterprise systems.

Air Force.

Army.

DISA.

Oracle.

Microsoft.

Government lawyers.

Corporate executives.

Program managers.

Procurement officials.

Everybody had a piece of the problem.

The formal structure told you who owned what.

It didn't tell you why people were making the decisions they were making.

So I started listening.

I sat with government program managers.

I talked with industry.

I read.

I asked questions.

Then I asked more questions.

What was actually driving the decision?

What did someone need to protect?

What had happened before?

Where had a previous agreement gone sideways?

Who had credibility?

Who didn't?

What was written into the contract?

And what was everybody actually trying to accomplish?

I learned quickly that there were two maps.

The first was the one everyone could see.

Organizations.

Authorities.

Contracts.

Processes.

Reporting chains.

The second was underneath it.

Relationships.

Incentives.

History.

Trust.

Fear.

Credibility.

Competing interests.

Personality.

That second map was usually where the interesting part lived.

The work was complicated enough on its own.

Enterprise software licensing at that scale meant real money and real consequences.

A disagreement could become a procurement fight.

A procurement fight could become a legal problem.

And decisions made in one room could affect people and systems across the Department of Defense.

I wasn't interested in making the system more complicated.

I wanted to understand where the friction actually was.

Then figure out where we could move.

That meant changing some of the ways we counted and accounted for enterprise software.

It meant negotiating requirements instead of simply accepting the ones we inherited.

It meant looking across fragmented procurement structures and asking whether they actually needed to remain fragmented.

It meant working with people who had very different incentives and finding enough common ground to get something done.

One result was a $40.5 million Adobe Joint Enterprise License Agreement spanning the Air Force, Army, and DISA.

Another was stewardship of more than $293 million in Oracle enterprise license agreements covering more than 300 mission-critical database and ERP systems.

The numbers matter.

But they aren't really the story.

The interesting part was learning how to operate at that scale without losing sight of the people inside the system.

You could be talking about a multimillion-dollar enterprise agreement in one conversation and a completely different problem with a program manager five minutes later.

Both mattered.

Both affected the outcome.

There were people who made that easier.

Ray Perry.

Herb Hunter.

Corporate counterparts.

Government program managers.

People who knew pieces of the system I didn't.

I learned to pay attention to the people who could explain what the paperwork couldn't.

Sometimes the fastest way through a complicated problem was simply to sit with someone long enough to understand what they were actually trying to solve.

SEAMLS taught me something different from AEHF.

At AEHF, I learned to connect technical experts under pressure.

At SEAMLS, I learned to do something similar at institutional scale.

Understand the system.

Understand the people inside it.

Find the space between the two.

Then see if something can move.

The bigger the system gets,

the more important it becomes to understand the people inside it.

← ALL BUILDS NEXT: GIBRALTAR →