New Role, Same Gap

There’s a pattern in my career that I didn’t plan but can’t seem to escape. Every role I’ve taken — advocate, engineering lead, independent consultant — has landed me in the same spot: the gap between what a company says it’s doing with technology and what’s actually happening on the ground.

This week I joined iSoftStone as a Senior Client Partner, and it already feels like a continuation of that same work.

I spent years in the Microsoft ecosystem building developer platforms, documentation systems, and the kind of foundational infrastructure that nobody puts on a slide but everything depends on. Then I went independent, helping companies get the basics right before bolting AI onto a wobbly stack. The common thread was always the same: the technology works fine. The problem is the space between the technology and the people who have to use it.

That’s what drew me to this role. It sits at the intersection of customer relationships, solution architecture, and technology strategy — which is another way of saying I help executive teams figure out what they actually need, not just what they think they want. The focus is Data & AI, specifically within the Microsoft ecosystem. Copilot, Azure, the whole stack. The tools are mature. The question is whether the organization is ready for what the tools make possible.

What surprised me most about the first week was the people. Global team — China, the U.S., India, Turkey, Malaysia — and every conversation brought a different angle on the same problems. That matters more than it sounds like it should. When you’re trying to help a client redesign how work happens, having a team that’s already doing it across five countries and three time zones is a useful reference point.

The Microsoft partnership is real, too. Not the “we’re a partner” kind of real where the logo goes on the website. The kind where the work is deeply integrated and the relationship has been tested by actual delivery. That’s the difference between a vendor and a partner, and it’s a distinction most companies get wrong.

I’ve been to enough conferences and read enough strategy decks to know that AI transformation is mostly a story companies tell themselves. The ones that actually transform are the ones who do the unglamorous work of changing how teams operate, not just what tools they use. That’s what I’m here to do.

Next week I’ll be at Microsoft Ignite, which feels like a fitting way to start. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Microsoft conferences regularly. The ecosystem has changed. I have too. Should be a good conversation.