Military experience and software development with Tom Pierce

In this episode, Tom Pierce, the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S), shares:

• Many in his family had been in military service
• In his first assignment, being assigned to the analysis team because he has a background in math and computers
• Grabbing an opportunity to use a computer that was unused
• Doing some simulation modeling solutions
• Leaving the army in good terms and going back to school
• Working for a defense contractor and then starting his own defense contracting firm
• Leveraging his experience in the military to solve civilian problems
• Some generational differences in the approach to merge technology and processes
• His experience of the rules and hierarchical models of working in the military, where, on the lighter side, ‘you cannot do anything without breaking some rule’
• Some examples of streaks of entrepreneurship that ran in his family
• The last straw that pushed him into entrepreneurship: a sense of frustration about how businesses were run and having his own values and ideas of how to run a company
• Not compromising on the value of working with end users
• How tech fluency is more important than tech savviness

Tom Pierce is the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) of Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Wake Forest University (1981) and a Master’s in Divinity (1993) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

After serving as an officer in the US Army, Tom has been immersed in the design and support of manufacturing software, as well as in the data-driven analysis of business and financial systems, primarily in large manufacturing facilities within the Aerospace Defense sector. 

A self-described MRP philosopher and ERP contrarian, Tom is a passionate advocate of simple approaches to complex problems. As a stubbornly resolute moderate, his company seeks to promote intelligent integrity by avoiding the opposing traps of overly simplistic naivety and overly complicated sophistication. 

For roughly four decades, Tom has focused his career and his company on the pursuit of trustworthy clarity and practical understanding of information, which is the light of all human pursuits