IRS CIO, then DHS CIO — consultant, then President of Resilient
Parts of this entry are out of date. It is published anyway, because an incomplete record that invites correction is more useful than no record at all.
Former Chief Information Officer of the Internal Revenue Service, and subsequently Chief Information Officer of the Department of Homeland Security — two of the largest and most difficult information estates in the United States government.
He worked for Jonathan Hare as a consultant at Resilient Network Systems, reconnected him with Tom Dohrmann in 2013, and was later recruited by Hare as President of the company.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Hare records his reason without softening it: he brought Spires in as President with the explicit intent of forcing out Bill Coleman as chief executive.
That is an account of Hare's own intent, not of anyone else's conduct. Coleman's account is not in this record and would be recorded here on the same terms as everything else.
Spires' credentials made him a credible alternative in a way few people would have been — a man who had run technology at the IRS and then at DHS is not easily characterized as a lightweight.
In 1999 Hare agreed to a clause allowing his investors to replace him as chief executive for any reason or none. In 2001 they used it, and he has described the consequences at length elsewhere in this record.
A decade later he set out to engineer the same outcome for somebody else. He recorded it that way on purpose. A record that published the silver bullet as something done to him, and omitted the time he did the equivalent, would be a different and much less useful document.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
The trust network, and the intelligence years
Open →whom Hare intended him to replaceChief executive of Resilient Network Systems
Open →the reconnectionMcKinsey's public sector lead — met in one decade, reconnected by accident in the next
Open →the same move, from the other sideA clause he signed, and the reason there was nothing he could do
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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