The challenge
The agency depended on applications built on dated technology that were costly to maintain and difficult to change. Skills to support the underlying platform were becoming scarce, raising long term operational risk.
Citizen facing interfaces did not meet current accessibility and usability expectations, and even modest changes required disproportionate effort. Integrating with newer services was awkward because of rigid, tightly coupled designs.
Leadership wanted to modernize these systems to improve service quality and maintainability while safeguarding continuity of essential public services throughout.
Technology landscape
Legacy applications on aging platforms with limited documentation and a shrinking pool of specialist skills.
Tightly coupled components that made change risky and integration with modern services difficult.
Citizen facing channels with accessibility and usability gaps relative to current standards.
Our approach
We assessed the application portfolio and prioritized modernization based on business value, risk and maintainability, choosing a suitable path for each system rather than a single approach for all.
We favored incremental modernization that delivered improvements in stages, reducing the risk inherent in a single large replacement and allowing value to be realized along the way.
We embedded accessibility and usability requirements into the design from the start, treating them as core rather than optional.
Implementation
We re-architected priority applications toward a more modular design, decoupling components so they could be changed and integrated more easily, and rebuilt interfaces to meet accessibility standards.
We introduced automated testing and modern delivery practices so changes could be released more safely and frequently, reducing the fragility that had made updates risky.
We migrated in carefully sequenced increments with fallback options, keeping essential services available to citizens throughout the program.
Outcomes
- Modernized interfaces improved accessibility and usability for citizens, making services easier to complete successfully.
- A more modular design made the applications easier to maintain and extend, reducing the risk associated with scarce legacy skills.
- Automated testing and modern delivery practices increased confidence in each release and shortened the time needed to make changes.
- Incremental delivery protected the continuity of essential public services during the transition.