My entire career has been shaped by a simple pattern: I see a problem, and then I jump in to solve it.
That is exactly what happened after my time working on 911 dispatch systems. I took a leap and started a new business called Metagenix because I saw a massive information bottleneck that was draining millions of dollars from companies.
Big corporations were trying to bring all their information together to make smart business decisions, but they were running into a major roadblock. Their data was trapped in isolated silos.
Think about trying to manage a large operation where every single crew is working out of a completely separate notebook. The folks handling your inventory do not talk to the sales team, and the shipping department is using an entirely different set of numbers. Because all that vital information is locked away in separate silos, nobody has the full picture. Everyone ends up impeding or undoing each other's work, and the company wastes a mountain of time and money trying to make sense of the chaos.
I jumped in to build a solution. At Metagenix we developed a software engine called MetaRecon to break down those walls. It acted like a master connector, looking into each separate bucket of information, figuring out how they matched up, and automatically building the bridges to link them together cleanly.
We were a bit ahead of our time, but the technology worked so well it was eventually acquired and folded into IBM's global systems. It taught me that you cannot run an efficient organization if your departments are treating information like a closely guarded secret.
We deal with that exact same kind of disconnected maze every day right here in Montana. You do not have to look any further than the recent homestead exemption rollout to see it. Montana families are dealing with massive property tax hikes, but when they try to apply for the Homestead Reduced Rate tax relief they are legally owed, they get buried under a mountain of confusing paperwork. The state forces you to navigate clunky portals and track down an obscure 17-digit geocode on a mapping database just to prove you live in your own house. Instead of making tax relief easy and automatic, the state forces you to navigate a fragmented bureaucracy just to keep a little more of your own money.
We do not need politicians who are content to keep funding a slow-moving, outdated system. We need leaders who look at a broken process, jump in to fix or replace it, and ensure the government actually works for regular taxpayers. Let's bring that practical, builder approach to our state capitol.
That's Montana common sense.
These career stories were originally posted on Facebook. You can follow the entire story at facebook.com/leman4mt.