Case study · Municipal government
A twenty-year-old system nobody could replace.
Multiple systems held together by a two-decade-old core and a handful of people who remembered how it worked. We made the risk visible and gave them a path off it.
The situation
The whole thing ran on institutional memory.
A twenty-year-old core system sat at the center of the operation, with multiple other systems wired into it over the years. It worked, but only because a small number of people remembered how and why it was held together the way it was. That is a serious continuity risk, and the kind nobody wants to be the one to name.
What we did
We took it on as a scoped project, because you cannot replace what you have not first understood.
- Mapped how the systems actually connected, and where the twenty-year-old core was doing work no one had documented.
- Located the single points of failure, the places where the operation depended on one person’s memory rather than a system.
- Turned all of it into something an outsider could read, so the path off the old core was a plan instead of a leap of faith.
The result
The risk stopped living in people’s heads.
What had been an unspoken continuity risk became a documented, understood picture with a path forward. The dependency on institutional memory was named and mapped, which is the first and hardest step in ever being able to replace a system that old.
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