Fifty years inside
the system.
Now fiction.
William C. James served in the leadership of the Department of Veterans Affairs IT organization — the $3.5 billion, 8,000-person DevOps operation his debut thriller draws from. He spent fifty years inside federal IT. He knows what it takes to hold that system together.
He didn’t research it.
He ran it.
William C. James started federal service in 1974 as a GS-1 file clerk — logging telephone tariff records at Scott Air Force Base, the absolute bottom of the civil service ladder. He retired from the Senior Executive Service four decades later as Deputy CIO for DevOps at the Department of Veterans Affairs, overseeing a $3.5 billion IT organization and more than 8,000 personnel.
In between, he wrote assembly language on mainframes, built the architecture underlying an NGA digital mapping production system, directed IT programs for USTRANSCOM during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and spent nineteen years as a private sector executive before the VA pulled him back.
He holds a 1998 patent for controlling remote equipment over the internet — filed when most people still thought of the web as a novelty — and was named an FCW Federal 100 honoree in 1997. The Janus Protocol is his debut novel. The Accidental Executive, his memoir, is available now.
The signal, not the noise.
Publication news, new fiction from the universe, and occasional essays on federal IT.