Jason Stewart

My wife and our six children are enrolled tribal members, and I have filed the enrollment paperwork six times. It was cumbersome every time. Somewhere upstream of that form, something structural was making it hard. When a friend who dealt with the same tribal government described hitting the same wall, I knew it was not just us.

I already suspected the answer was software. That is exactly why I did not propose software. I proposed a paid discovery engagement to interview the people doing the work and find out what was actually breaking. If the evidence contradicted me, they deserved to know that before committing to anything larger.

I led every one of the sessions. Each opened the same way and followed the same question arc, so the answers could be compared instead of merely collected. Each began with a walkthrough of a rough prototype, because people react to something concrete far more usefully than they answer an abstract question. Then I mostly listened.

Everything went into a structured database I built during the engagement, so every finding tied back to a specific workflow rather than to an impression.

Nine workflow archetypes accounted for every workflow we documented, and underneath them the same few primitives kept recurring: intake, approve, assign, track, report, notify, publish, attribute. Eight departments had each built their own version of those primitives, separately, on paper and email, with small variations that quietly produced rework and gaps. Approval was the hub, a dependency of every other archetype. This was not eight departments with eight problems. It was one small set of patterns, rebuilt eight times.

None of this was anyone's failure. One department had watched the buildings and land it maintains grow roughly tenfold since 1996 while its own staffing stayed flat, and between 85 and 90 percent of the tribe's funding comes from outside, arriving with its own reporting obligations attached. The exposure was real.

What struck me most was how much still got done. People had built their own systems to keep serving members: a grant tracker taught to themselves from tutorial videos, a hand-built contractor payment ledger, a full-year reporting calendar covering 47 separate obligations.

One operations platform owned by the tribal government, which builds those shared primitives once instead of eight times. I specified it in a requirements document written to be vendor portable: 172 pages, 34 features with acceptance criteria, a twelve entity data model, accessibility to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and the federal reporting obligations they already carried. They could have handed it to any developer and asked for a bid.