Your modernization
journey starts
with better questions.

Define the outcome before the system.

A successful go-live is necessary, but it is not the objective. A short, plain-language statement of what must improve gives employees, executives, legislators and partners the same target. It also gives the modernization team a way to test whether design choices are actually serving the mission.

Leadership teams often land on a handful of outcomes such as:

More eligible services completed digitally, so people who need in-person help have a better experience.

Shorter, more predictable waits for public services and faster responses to operational requests.

Faster turnaround on permits, licenses, records requests and other administrative work, with timely access to information for field teams.

Fewer manual workarounds and less rework for employees.

Policy and legislative changes implemented in weeks rather than months.

Naming what modernization will not do on its own is equally useful. A new system will not automatically fix every policy, clear every backlog or solve every staffing challenge. Saying so early protects confidence later.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What three performance outcomes should citizens and employees notice first?

2. What makes modernization necessary now, rather than in three years?

3. What should modernization explicitly not promise?

Build the baseline before the transformation begins.

A baseline does not need to be sophisticated to be useful. Useful measures include time to service, turnaround on applications or records requests, and the age of unresolved work. Transportation, licensing and law enforcement agencies should pair these with the safety, accuracy and operational reliability measures their missions require.

How leadership reviews the measures matters as much as the measures themselves. Reviews work best as problem-solving forums: what is driving the trend, where work is getting stuck, and what help the responsible team needs.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What can you measure reliably today, and where are the gaps?

2. What are your current service models already teaching you?

3. Which forum will review trends regularly and coordinate help across units?

Do not digitize complexity you no longer need.

Modernization is a rare chance to reconsider how work gets done. Some steps exist because of law, safety or identity integrity. Others exist only because an old system or past practice required them. Carrying those forward into a new platform locks in their cost for another generation.

The people who know which steps add value are on the front line. Frontline employees and supervisors know where the workarounds live, which exceptions are real and which steps exist only because the system demands them. Treat them as citizens of the modernization whose trust must be earned, not simply users who will be told what is changing.

Good places to look first are processes with duplicate data entry, hand-offs between units, paper or spreadsheet steps, frequent citizen return visits, poorly documented exceptions, or dependence on a few experienced people.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which five processes deserve a hard look before IT development requirements are written?

2. Who has the authority to remove unnecessary steps and standardize work across units?

3. Which statutory or regulatory changes would simplify the work, and how long would they take?

Preserve choice until leadership has weighed the trade-offs.

State agencies can modernize their core systems in several different ways, and the way a procurement is written can quietly narrow the options before leadership has weighed them. Broadly, the models are:

Whatever direction a team leans, ask the same questions of every option: who owns the code, configuration and data; what legislative change costs and takes; whether support partners can be changed; the full ten-year cost; and which peer states are actually live.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which delivery models offer you the opportunity to innovate quickly and cost effectively?

2. How much long-term control and flexibility is worth paying for?

3. Is a hosted model or cloud model more cost effective over the long-term?

Own the decisions that determine long-term freedom of action.

Partners can provide technology, integration, hosting and specialized expertise. That reliance is normal: three in four organizations in Kyndryl’s 2025 mainframe survey use outside providers for modernization. What matters is being explicit about which decisions stay with the agency.

Regardless of delivery model, agency leaders should retain ownership of business rules and policy; data and data definitions; process design; program priorities; risk decisions; acceptance criteria; and benefits realization.

Dependencies after go-live — including system changes, data access, reporting, interfaces, upgrades and cybersecurity — are far easier to shape before a contract is signed than after.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which policy, data, process and risk decisions must stay under agency control?

2. Do you have enough internal expertise to evaluate partner recommendations independently?

3. What support do you need (or want) to manage and improve the system after go-live?

Map the people who shape the outcome, then build their needs into the design.

Kyndryl’s 2026 research found that modernization decision-making is distributed: an average of three internal groups hold decision authority, and nine organizational functions have meaningful influence. For a state agency, the stakeholder map also includes other government bodies, local partners and the people and organizations that rely on its services, decisions and information every day.

Engagement should be structured, not ceremonial: identify who must be consulted on which decisions, what input is needed, and how that input will be resolved and traced into the modernization design.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which internal, government and ecosystem stakeholders need to be engaged?

2. What does each group need from the future agency, and where do those needs conflict?

3. How will those needs be translated into process design, requirements, interfaces, testing and rollout?

Protect the people who know the work — and the trust required to change it.

The people most needed to modernize an agency are the same people needed to run it. They hold the business rules, operational exceptions and knowledge of the people they serve that rarely appear in documentation. Assigning them to modernization while holding them to a full operational workload creates hidden schedule and quality risk.

Capacity also depends on the quality of partnerships. The strongest public-private partnerships start with a mindset shift on both sides. Companies need to see public servants as the mission-driven professionals they are. Agencies get more from partners when they use them as a source of new methods and thinking, not only as vendors to be monitored. Neither shift changes who is accountable; both change how much the partnership can achieve.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which employees and leaders are essential to designing and testing the future agency, and how will their time be protected?

2. What capacity will you need that does not exist in the agency today?

3. What would a true partnership with an external company look like, and how would you know you had one?