Engagement briefs, declassified.
My work is confidential, that's the point. Where clients permit, briefs are published in full; elsewhere identities are permanently withheld and content declassifies as you read.
When disaster strikes, civilian and military responders too often meet on the worst day possible: the day of the event. Military support to civil authorities is bound by federal law, activation processes and timelines that most civilian agencies discover only mid-crisis. Arizona's emergency community needed those conversations to happen before the sirens.
Designed and lead-facilitated a one-day Targeted Event Readiness Forum bringing 78 leaders to one table: fire, law enforcement, hospitals, public health, tribal nations, county and state emergency management, the National Guard, and active-duty commands including the regional Defense Coordinating Officer. Three escalating scenarios (an urban-wildland fire, a major earthquake, a stadium bombing) required each sector to state plainly what it could do, what it could not, and what it needed from the others.
Participants left with a working understanding of military activation criteria, the 72-hour immediate-response authority of base commanders, and the request processes that unlock support, with concrete gaps logged in communications interoperability, patient tracking and family reunification for follow-up. Most importantly: working relationships across sectors that had never planned together.
A medical research institute, jointly owned by a major university and a metropolitan hospital and health service, needed a five-year strategy. The harder problem sat beneath the document. The two founding partners brought complementary strengths, world-class academic science on one side, deep clinical expertise and patient access on the other, but were pulling in different directions.
Governance had drifted from strategic to operational, the partners' roles and expectations were unsettled, and friction between the two principals was quietly slowing the institute's progress.
Engaged as Engagement Lead, an independent subcontractor to a consulting firm, to develop and land a five-year strategic plan in full consultation with the partners. Scope defined with the steering committee, governance and partnership documents reviewed, leaders interviewed across the health service, the institute and the university, a joint planning workshop run, and the draft returned to the committee for approval.
The real work was as diplomatic as it was analytical: surfacing the competing agendas, resetting the partner roles, and building a shared account of purpose that both institutions could own.
A large public hospital and health service had set a strategy to lean harder on digital and data, but its business intelligence function could not keep pace. Requests for reports, dashboards and analytics arrived from every direction, clinical, corporate and finance, with no shared way to prioritise them.
The BI roles, skills and resourcing had grown piecemeal rather than to a deliberate operating model. The organisation needed an independent read of its current state and a credible target it could resource and govern.
Engaged as Engagement Consultant, an independent subcontractor to a consulting firm, to run the current-state review and design the future-state operating model for the business intelligence and analytics function. Existing positions, functions and resourcing were reviewed, demand and capability gaps mapped against the organisation's strategic objectives, and stakeholders interviewed across clinical and corporate areas.
Preliminary findings and concept-level options were tested with the client at verification checkpoints before the draft report was written, so the recommendations were owned, not just delivered.
A target operating model the executive could act on: a hub-and-spoke structure that separates a central data engineering and governance hub from analytics embedded in the business; a demand-prioritisation framework distinguishing break-fix, business-as-usual, strategic-project and ad-hoc work, each with a clear owner and method; and a governance model routing clinical and corporate requests through the right committees against explicit criteria, including patient outcomes, safety and quality, financial benefit and strategic alignment.
The report set out the role and capability map for the future function, the additional capability required, and an implementation roadmap with indicative cost.
Dave took a room of 78 leaders from fire, law enforcement, hospitals, emergency management, tribal nations and the military, many of whom had never planned together, and had them working as one group within the hour. He carries credibility in both worlds, so nothing was lost in translation. The forum delivered exactly what it was designed for: shared understanding and working relationships in place before a disaster, not on the day of one.
Deb Roepke, Executive Director, Coyote Crisis Collaborative
Dave has a tremendous amount of experience in ICT and such a calm nature with extremely relevant advice. The current nature of my work and challenges is identical to what Dave has previously gone through, and managed to fix at multiple organisations. His guidance has already helped me improve both as an individual and the processes of our ICT function.
Reesen Pillai, Calvary
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