Legacy Application Assessment: AI-Accelerated Modernization Roadmap
State & Local Government | Application Assessment
Large State Government Agency
A large state agency with thousands of employees operating across multiple regional offices statewide, delivering essential public services and processing high volumes of constituent transactions. While the agency had recently completed a major modernization of its constituent-facing systems, a portfolio of internal administrative applications — built decades ago — remained on legacy platforms, creating operational drag and workforce management challenges.
Internal Legacy Applications Blocking Workforce Modernization
While the agency had invested significantly in modernizing its public-facing service platforms, a set of critical internal applications had been left behind — specifically, a Position Control System and a Personnel Data application used to manage the agency's workforce of several thousand employees.
- Aging Codebase with No Documentation: The two applications comprised approximately 1 million lines of legacy code built on outdated frameworks. Original developers had long since departed, and no comprehensive documentation of business rules, data models, or system dependencies existed. Institutional knowledge was concentrated in a small number of senior staff approaching retirement.
- Manual, Error-Prone Workforce Processes: The Position Control System managed authorized headcount, position establishment, modification, and abolishment — but relied on manual workarounds and spreadsheet supplements to handle processes the legacy system never fully supported. Personnel data updates required redundant entry across disconnected systems, introducing errors and compliance risk.
- No Integration with Modern Systems: The legacy applications couldn't integrate with the agency's recently modernized cloud-hosted platforms or with statewide enterprise HR and payroll initiatives. Data had to be manually extracted, reformatted, and reconciled — consuming dozens of staff hours monthly.
- Scalability and Security Concerns: The on-premise architecture couldn't scale to support evolving state mandates around workforce reporting, diversity tracking, and real-time position management. Security patching was increasingly difficult on the unsupported platform, creating audit findings.
- Failed Prior Discovery Efforts: A previous attempt to scope modernization through traditional consulting had produced a high-level document with generic recommendations but no actionable roadmap, no validated business rules, and no credible cost or timeline estimate — leaving leadership unable to secure budget approval.
The agency needed a fast, rigorous assessment that would produce the concrete artifacts required to justify a modernization investment — and a proof of concept that would demonstrate the viability of an AI-driven approach before committing to a full program.
Sembix deployed its AI-driven assessment methodology using Sembix Strata™ and the App Modernization Workflow Pack, installed directly within the agency's own AWS environment to meet strict data residency and security requirements. The engagement was structured as a rapid assessment followed by a targeted proof of concept — designed to deliver actionable modernization artifacts and demonstrate production-grade feasibility in just four weeks.
AI-Powered Legacy Code Analysis
Sembix Strata's AI agents performed a comprehensive analysis of the full 1-million-line codebase across both applications. Rather than simply inventorying code, the platform built a semantic model of each application — automatically extracting business rules, feature logic, data structures, user workflows, and inter-system dependencies that had never been formally documented.
Comprehensive Assessment Artifacts
The assessment produced a complete set of modernization planning deliverables:
- Legacy Component Inventory — Technical analysis of outdated technologies and architecture insights
- Feature Inventory — Business-aligned inventory prioritized by impact and complexity
- User Journey Report — Analysis of user workflows supporting user-centered modernization
- Data Model Report — Assessment of data structures for scalability and integrity
- Product Backlog — Prioritized modernization tasks structured for agile execution
- Feature Sizing & Pricing — Clear, fixed-price view of the full modernization investment
- Schedule Estimate — Timeline with milestones and dependency mapping
- To-Be Architecture — AWS-based blueprint for the modernized applications
Proof of Concept
Following the assessment, Sembix collaborated with the agency's application team to identify and prioritize one high-impact feature for a proof of concept. The selected feature was fully modernized and delivered as a complete, peer-reviewed pull request including:
- Complete source code, deployment scripts, and automated tests
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates for secure deployment
- Compliance-aligned implementation with security controls
- Comprehensive technical documentation
AWS Services Utilized
Assessment completed in 1 week, proof of concept delivered in 1 week
Full semantic model built across both applications with AI-driven discovery
All work executed within the agency's own AWS environment — no data left the secure boundary
Fully modernized feature ready for immediate deployment with no rework required
Actionable Modernization Roadmap
For the first time, agency leadership had a complete, validated picture of what modernization would cost, how long it would take, and what the target architecture looked like — the concrete artifacts needed to secure budget approval and move forward with confidence.
Business Rules Finally Documented
The AI-driven assessment captured and validated the full inventory of business rules, workflows, and data dependencies embedded in 1 million lines of undocumented legacy code — institutional knowledge that would have otherwise been lost as senior staff retired.
Proven AI-Driven Methodology
The proof of concept demonstrated that Sembix's AI-accelerated approach could deliver production-grade modern code at a pace and quality level that traditional rewrite methods could not match — validating the approach before the agency committed to a full modernization program.
Fixed-Price Transparency
The feature sizing and pricing report gave leadership a clear, fixed-price view of the full modernization investment — eliminating the open-ended cost risk that had stalled prior modernization attempts.
Security and Compliance by Design
The entire engagement operated within the agency's secure AWS environment with full alignment to state data handling policies. The to-be architecture and POC were built with compliance controls from the start, not retrofitted after the fact.
Foundation for Enterprise Modernization
The assessment artifacts, architecture blueprint, and proven methodology positioned the agency to move directly into phased modernization execution — and established a repeatable approach that could be applied to other legacy applications across the agency's portfolio.
Sembix is an AWS Partner specializing in AI-accelerated application modernization. Through Sembix Strata, our agentic AI platform, we help organizations modernize legacy applications at unprecedented speed while maintaining quality and reducing risk.
Our approach combines deep technical expertise with cutting-edge AI capabilities to deliver modernization outcomes that would traditionally require teams 10-20x larger. Sembix holds AWS Partner status and specializes in helping enterprises across energy, government, healthcare, and financial services transform their critical applications.
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