The situation
A state agency had been running a custom case-management system built in 2003. The original developer had retired, the source repository was a SharePoint folder, and a 6-hour Tuesday-night batch job was the only way new cases moved between teams.
Caseworkers had built their own Excel-based shadow tools to compensate, which meant the system of record and the working reality had drifted significantly apart.
What we did
- Spent six weeks shadowing caseworkers before writing a line of code — captured 137 implicit rules that lived in tribal knowledge.
- Replatformed onto a cloud-native stack with event-driven workflow, replacing the nightly batch with sub-second handoffs.
- Built Section 508 conformance and FedRAMP-aware controls into design from day one, not retrofit at the end.
- Migrated 1.4M historical records with zero loss and a published data lineage for every field.
- Cutover in a single weekend with the old system in read-only mode for 90 days as a fallback.
The outcome
- 40% reduction in median case processing time, measured against a 12-month pre-cutover baseline.
- Caseworker satisfaction (annual survey) moved from 3.1/5 to 4.4/5.
- Two FTE redeployed off batch monitoring and onto actual case work.
- Audit findings on the previous system dropped from 9 open to 0 at the next assessment cycle.
The institutional knowledge — those 137 implicit rules — was the actual product. The new platform was the wrapper that made it operational.
What other agencies should take from it
Legacy modernization fails most often because the team replaces the system but loses the rules. Spend the discovery time before the build, not after.
And don't underestimate read-only fallback. Caseworkers trusted the new system faster knowing the old one was still there if something broke.