The Compliance Gap That's Costing Us the Mission

One of the hardest things I dealt with as CXO of the United States Department of War was not the scale of the mission. It was the gap between what the mission demanded and what the tools were actually cleared to do.

The DoW runs on data about people. Service members, civilians, veterans, contractors. And if you want to understand how any of those people are experiencing a healthcare system, an onboarding process, a benefits workflow, or a transition out of service, you need to be able to ask them. Directly, at scale, and with enough fidelity to act on the answers.

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: understanding service members starts with being able to hear from them. Not through proxies or lagging indicators or secondhand reporting up a chain of command. Through direct, structured feedback collected at the moments that matter. That is the foundation. Retention strategy, benefits design, readiness planning ... all of it gets built on top of it. If that foundation is compromised because your tools aren't cleared to hold the data, you're making consequential decisions with an incomplete picture.

The problem is that the moment you collect that kind of data inside a government environment, you're operating in a space that requires IL4 authorization at minimum. And most enterprise experience management tools that commercial organizations use without a second thought are not cleared for that.

So you end up with a choice. Collect less sensitive data and accept incomplete insights. Build something custom, which takes years and budget you don't have. Or wait for the commercial market to catch up to your compliance requirements.

The budget reality makes it worse. Defense appropriations aren't structured for long-cycle commercial software investment. Program offices are underfunded. Staff are already stretched. The gap persists not because leadership doesn't understand the value of listening — it persists because the resourcing model and compliance environment have historically made it easier to deprioritize than to solve.

Companies like Qualtrics closing the path to IL4 is not a compliance checkbox story. It means the people running HR transformation and service member feedback loops inside government agencies can finally use tools fit for the environment, without routing around the problem or settling for degraded insight.

Watching the commercial market take FedRAMP and IL4 seriously as a genuine product investment is one of the more encouraging things happening in govtech right now. Because when those tools are available and funded, the first thing that becomes possible is also the most important: actually hearing from the people doing the mission.

That is where it all starts.