Rocio Bauer’s profile over at WashingtonExec is worth your time if you’re thinking about what leadership looks like when you’re serving the Army through a technology lens. She’s spent her career at the intersection of mission and modernization, and that combination—deep operational context plus the ability to translate it into technical requirements—is exactly what we map for when a client asks us to surface candidates for senior roles in defense IT or cyber.
The best placements I’ve made in the last few years share that same profile: people who’ve done the work, held a clearance, and can walk into a room with both the CIO and the warfighter. It’s not a common skill set. You can teach someone technology, but you can’t teach twenty years of context in how the Army actually operates.
If you’re building or rebuilding a leadership team in this space, start by asking whether your candidates have served the mission in some capacity—not just sold to it. That’s the filter that matters.