Nearly three decades wiring the places everyone else forgot — fiber to the home in rural California, broadband across 1.4 million acres of tribal land, government IT infrastructure for cities and nations. W. James Hettrick doesn't just understand connectivity. He has built it in the hardest places on the map. And the hardest places are exactly where Tymmber is going.
W. James Hettrick began building information infrastructure before most people understood what information infrastructure was. In 1997, he stepped into the role of Chief Information Officer at the City of Loma Linda, California — a position he would hold for nearly a decade — and became one of the earliest municipal pioneers of Fiber to the Home (FTTh) broadband. In an era when fiber deployment was still considered an enterprise luxury, James was running it to residential addresses in a Southern California city and earning national recognition for it. His work earned him the 2nd Annual FTTXcellence Award in 2005, honoring his contribution to optical access network deployment in North America. That award was not given to theorists. It was given to the person who actually ran the fiber.
From Loma Linda, he built a parallel track as Chairman of Information Systems Management Solutions, Inc. (ISMS) — his own consultancy, which he ran for nearly eleven years. ISMS worked at the intersection of government, education, and commercial enterprise: identifying technology solutions that served organizational goals rather than vendor agendas, building win-win strategies between community leaders, technology architects, and construction teams. That combination — visionary planning, unbiased technical analysis, and hands-in-the-ground execution — became the signature of everything James has done since.
He then took that expertise to larger and more complex stages. At the City of San Antonio, as Senior IT Manager for Computing Systems and Data Centers, he managed IT infrastructure for 38 departments serving 12,000 employees across 400 sites — one of the largest municipal technology operations in Texas. At the City of Kent, Washington, he supported multiple enterprise systems across 40 sites and 1,300 employees. Each role deepened his understanding of what it takes to run technology at scale in the public sector — where failure is not an option and budgets are never enough.
"Pioneer in fiber optic and wireless networks — developing strategic information systems management solutions. I love to create highly efficient teams which reflect a synergy of alliances between business leaders, technology leaders, and skilled construction teams."
The chapter of James's career that may be most relevant to Tymmber's mission came when he stepped into the role of Chief Information Officer for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation — serving 1,300 employees across 140 programs at 160 locations spanning 1.4 million acres across four geographic districts. Coordinating and directing technology and telecommunications for tribal schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, museums, and operations across that kind of terrain is not a job for someone who thinks connectivity is a software problem. It requires understanding the physical world — the land, the distances, the infrastructure gaps — and then engineering solutions that actually survive contact with reality.
That work led directly to his role as Director of Fiber Construction at Native Network, Inc., where the mission was unambiguous: Indian Country is underserved by modern telecom technology. Limited internet access, limited connectivity, limited opportunity. James helped change that, bringing fiber infrastructure to communities that had been left behind by every previous generation of technological investment. Building connectivity in places no one else would build it — that is not a resume line. That is a value system expressed through construction.
Today, as Solutions Architect II at TEKsystems Global Services — one of the world's leading IT staffing and technology solutions firms — James applies that accumulated depth across enterprise clients globally. TEKsystems operates at the intersection of IT services, talent, and business transformation, and James's role in their telecommunications practice gives him a current, operational view of where infrastructure technology is heading and what it takes to deploy it at scale. He is not watching the industry from the outside. He is inside the machine.
[Placeholder: James's statement on what drew him to Tymmber's Moonshot vision — what he sees in the rural broadband challenge, why outdoor recreation infrastructure matters to him personally, and what he brings to this table.]
The Tymmber Moonshot projects — a Carbon Free Outdoor Recreation Resort at Elephant Butte, a Sierra County State Recreation Area, and Prosperity Place — are not simple construction projects. They are exercises in building connected, functional, technology-enabled destinations in rural New Mexico terrain that currently has none of that infrastructure. That means fiber. That means wireless. That means power architecture, data systems, and the kind of government and tribal coordination that most people find impossible to navigate. James has done versions of all of it, in harder places, with fewer resources, for longer.
He is also a published scholar — co-authoring Mexico and Mexico City in the World Economy with Dr. James Pick and Dr. Edgar Butler (Westview Press, 2001) — and has authored papers and presentations on demographics, geographic information systems, economics, and management. That combination of field operator and analytical thinker is not common. When the Moonshots move from vision to engineering, James will be one of the people in the room who has actually done this before.