Bill James

President, FedSmarts, LLC
Vienna, Virginia

After more than five decades in federal information technology, I started FedSmarts with a simple premise: technology companies selling to VA deserve better than what the generic federal consulting market offers. They deserve an advisor who actually knows the organization — the structure, the leadership, the programs, the procurement vehicles — and can give them a straight read rather than a repackaged briefing deck.

My career gave me that knowledge from the inside. As VA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Development and Operations in the Office of Information and Technology, I led DevOps, the largest piece of VA’s IT organization — responsible for delivering enterprise-wide technology products and services while transforming how the organization worked. I saw how buying decisions got made, where influence actually lived, and what separated the vendors who built lasting VA relationships from those who couldn’t get a meeting.

Before VA, I served as a member of the Senior Executive Service at the Pentagon, where I was the senior IT civilian in the Air Force Office of the CIO. In that role I worked on enterprise architecture standardization, technology modernization, and the kind of cross-agency coordination that shapes how large federal technology programs actually operate — not how they’re described in a press release.

Prior to government, I spent two decades as an executive at systems integration companies serving the federal technology market. I’ve been on both sides of the table. I know how proposals get evaluated, how incumbents get displaced, and how companies that look identical on paper end up with very different outcomes.

FedSmarts clients are BD directors, capture managers, account executives, and business unit leaders at technology companies with real stakes in the VA market. I work with them as a peer — not as a vendor, not as a coach, and not as someone who’s going to tell them what they want to hear. If an opportunity isn’t winnable, I’ll say so. If a capture strategy has a hole in it, I’ll point to it.

That’s what 50 years in federal IT is for.