Hack Your Bureaucracy

Start with existing technology. If you ever find yourself working with an older, legacy database, something that they are very good at is spitting out a spreadsheet of data at regular intervals (e.g., nightly). Rather than wait years (or decades) for it to be replaced, use this to your advantage. If you can get your hands on an existing nightly data report, you can use it to power an extraordinary number of tools outside the mainframe itself, such as status trackers or progress dashboards. Something legacy databases are not great at is scaling to enable many simultaneous connections (e.g., a million people directly connecting to the database to check their claim status, and compulsively refreshing). This is a commonly cited reason for why things like self-service tools don’t exist more often: the business usually wants this functionality very much, and is just waiting to completely replace the mainframe with a modern database that can handle the load first. Strangle this attitude with an approach that only needs to connect to the database once or twice a day, combining the mainframe’s spreadsheet export with a modern tool scalable enough to handle your audience.