Introduction

You are reading Expert Mode, a novel about making government work better. To receive every chapter as it is released, subscribe.

This is a book for people working within a broken system: Government.

Government doesn’t work for Americans. It doesn’t measure up to their expectations for what the modern world can give them. Thanks to fast advances in commercial technology, the gap between government standards and public expectations is widening at a faster rate, at a time when government resources are slimmer and slimmer.

If you work within government, you know how broken it can feel. This book is not about how to fix a broken system. Rather, it’s about how to work more effectively within that broken system. Truly fixing our government requires action from a broad set of leaders and institutions way beyond your office. This book presumes those people aren't coming to help you anytime soon. But you still need to deliver for your public. My goal for this book is to provide ideas for how to succeed in spite of all the things standing in your way. 

This book is targeted at people within public sector organizations responsible for day-to-day operations and decision making. While it might feel like a book primarily about the role of technology within government, it is really about the tools and processes government organizations use to get things done, technologically or otherwise.

I first had the idea for this book in 2023. I began writing it in earnest in the summer of 2024. My goal then was to help my peers in the U.S. Government navigate digital transformation.

In 2026, the audience and stakes are larger. National, state, local, and multi-national governments are all at a critical point where they must show their constituents that they can deliver, at a time when they are under attack from very powerful forces trying to prevent them from doing so.

More and more, getting things done within government is a function of how quickly an IT department can deliver results. And for that reason, this is somewhat of a handbook for public sector CIOs. Federal CIOs have long been said to have the shortest tenure in the federal government. Whether it is true or not, much has been written about the gap between average tenure and the time required to be effective. In a job that can take months to get one’s bearings, one can be halfway through their tenure before they feel like they can even get to work.

I have been a CIO, and I’ve worked closely with over a dozen others over the years. After seeing the same patterns over and over, I wanted to make a guide to help IT leaders speedrun their indoctrination period so they can get right to work solving problems.

But this book is not solely about IT. As you’ll see in these pages, I believe effective public sector IT is far more about great non-technical operations than it is about technology itself. And building good operations requires an understanding of how each piece of an organization fits together with others, both administratively and culturally. This book is for all bureaucrats, not just those in IT. 

Several of the events that I depict are slight adaptations of real events that I participated in during my time as a Federal employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Student Aid, and U.S. Treasury, and as a contractor within various national security components of the U.S. Government. 

But mostly, this is a work of fiction. It’s a story that I hope contains useful lessons for you, rather than a playbook for navigating every potential scenario you might encounter. It is not all-encompassing. I do not account for every single mine in the minefield that is government service. My coverage of cyber issues is thin. I make no mention of audits. You will notice that time passes much faster in my imaginary world than it does in government, or that my portrayal of certain internal procedures is inaccurate. Or that the series of events falls into place a little too neatly to be believable. Veteran CIOs may find my depiction of government IT wholly unlike their own experience, or even thin and superficial. My hope is that you’ll take the story for what it is: an easily consumable, even fun, way to learn some new things that you can apply within your own organization, even if your big challenges differ from those that I focus on in the following pages. I expect readers to take the lessons that apply to their situations, and ignore the ones that don’t. I also do not expect anyone to agree with every lesson. You’ll probably vehemently disagree with some things but find other ideas useful to you. That’s fine. 

You might find that none of the ideas or solutions I propose in this book are groundbreaking. I don’t disagree. However, I frequently see old, obvious solutions to problems go ignored. Such ideas are worth repeating.  

Sometimes I use the names of actual, real-life entities, because doing so makes things clearer for the reader. Other times, I make up entity names, either because it doesn’t matter, or because you know exactly which company I’m talking about without me taking the legal risk of using their name. 

My pursuit of easy consumption is what drove my decision to use the format of a novel. And not just any novel. I have deliberately based this story on (some would say copied) The Goal, the classic business book about industrial process optimization. When I first read The Goal 13 years ago, it instantly resonated with me. I saw the parallels between industrial processes like oven curing times and staff onboarding lags. 

This is not the first time someone has used The Goal as the inspiration for a book about IT. In 2013, The Phoenix Project explained how DevOps-powered IT operations can reform an organization. But in government, technology is rarely the problem. We often understand the technology perfectly, because by the time we are ready to deploy that technology, it has already been an industry standard for years. Instead, the obstacles are the non-technical aspects of the organization: procurement, hiring, culture, and political whim. I set out to write a story about that machinery, and which levers to pull in order to make the right tech show up at the right time. Instead of DevOps, you might call it OpsOps. 

If you haven’t read The Goal or The Phoenix Project, there’s something you should know: They are not exactly classic works of literature. They're business books with a soap opera wrapper. Goldratt knew that people had a hard time consuming his lessons in their traditional form, so he wrote The Goal in the hopes that those lessons would get more attention through melodrama than they would in a textbook. He was right. My goal for Expert Mode is the same. This story is corny and pulpy, but it's also really important. For those who have never worked in government, I hope this format makes government and its failings easier to understand.

I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it weird and occasionally funny. I mostly hope it helps you succeed.

You are reading Expert Mode, a novel about making government work better. To receive every chapter as it is released, subscribe.