Custom Software for State and Local Government

Where custom software fits in state and local government

The work worth building is usually a process the public has to go through that still ends in paper, or a staff workflow held together by a spreadsheet only one person understands.

• →Online applications and requests. Board and commission applications, permit and license requests, facility bookings and records requests, submitted once and routed to the right office instead of printed, scanned and re-emailed.
• →Status the public can see. Residents check where their request is without calling, and staff stop answering the same question by phone.
• →Staff review and approval tools. A queue for each department, with the history of every submission and every decision kept in one place.
• →Vacancy and roster tracking. Terms, expirations and open seats on appointed bodies tracked in the system rather than in a binder.
• →AI-assisted intake, with staff deciding. Incoming forms and letters read, categorized and routed, with a staff member making every decision that affects a resident.

What we have built for the public sector

We built MatchBoard with SC Women in Leadership: a platform that lets cities and counties manage appointments to their public boards and commissions and lets residents apply online, replacing a process that meant finding and downloading a PDF, filling it in by hand and hoping it reached the right office. It gives administrators a central database of boards, tracks expired, vacant and upcoming seats, and lets reviewers collaborate on appointments.

For a multi-state corrections vendor serving jail facilities, we replaced a legacy on-premise platform facility by facility, without a client-facing outage; the anonymized case study describes how.

Accessibility is a legal requirement with a date on it

A private company can choose its customers. A city cannot. Public-facing software has to work for a resident using a screen reader, keyboard-only navigation, or a phone on a slow connection.

For state and local governments that is now a written rule. The Justice Department's ADA Title II web rule requires the web content and mobile apps a public entity provides, directly or through a contractor, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Entities with a population of 50,000 or more must comply from April 26, 2027; entities under 50,000 and special district governments from April 26, 2028. Software a contractor builds for you is covered the same way as software your own staff build.

So WCAG 2.1 AA belongs in the scope as acceptance criteria, not in a test at the end. How it is checked depends on the scope: automated checks during development, and hand testing of the key flows with a screen reader where the engagement calls for it. We report exactly what was tested and how. We do not issue certificates: conformance is a property of what ships, and it has to be maintained. How the rule and its exceptions apply to a particular service is a question for your counsel.

Replacing a legacy system without a cutover weekend

Most public-sector systems cannot be switched off for a weekend. Residents still need to submit, staff still need to approve, and records still need to be retrievable.

Where the engagement calls for it, we replace them in parallel. The new system launches alongside the old one for one process or one department at a time; data moves across in stages and is reconciled against the old system; and the old system is retired only after the new one has carried real work. We build to your agency's records retention schedule: the records you are required to keep are migrated, not abandoned, and every decision recorded in the new system keeps who made it and when.

Procurement, and federal work

A public-sector project rarely starts with a signed contract next week. Our scopes carry a written price and milestones, which is usually easier to fit into a purchase order or a bid than open-ended hourly work, though your purchasing rules decide how it is bought. The scope document can serve as the basis for a quote or a solicitation response. We have come into public-sector work as a subcontractor through a prime contractor and by responding to RFPs.

If you are a federal program or a defense contractor, our federal software development pages cover that work separately.

How a government engagement runs

We start with the 90-minute AI workflow audit: one session tracing a single public process from the resident's first step to the final record, and marking where paper, email and rekeying happen. The audit is complimentary when it is bundled with a larger build and available as a paid one-off on its own.

From that we write a priced scope for one process in one department. Prototype, staging, and deployment milestones are agreed in the written scope. Before the build, we agree what better means (days from application to decision, or phone calls asking for status) and you record today's number, so the result can be checked against it.