Technology Advisory & Systems Engineering for County Governments
Technology Advisory and Systems Engineering for County Governments
Independent requirements, procurement, and oversight support for multi-department county system replacements that carry federal funding conditions.
A county system replacement is rarely one department's project. Replacing the property tax system means the assessor, the auditor-controller, and the treasurer-tax collector, offices that in many counties are separately elected and none of which reports to the others. Replacing the ERP means every department that cuts a purchase order or runs a payroll. Replacing an eligibility or case management system means the county's daily operations sit on top of a state platform the county does not control. The CIO is held accountable for the outcome while holding direct authority over a fraction of the people whose decisions determine it.
Federal cost sharing makes this harder before it makes it easier. Human services, child support, child welfare, health, and justice systems often draw federal financial participation, and that funding carries conditions: planning and approval steps with the funding agency ahead of major procurements, procurement standards under the federal uniform guidance, cost allocation across benefiting programs, and in several programs independent verification and validation while the work is underway. A county is doing a once-in-fifteen-years project under review by people who see these projects every week.
What these environments look like
- Property tax systems spanning the assessor, auditor-controller, and tax collector, tied to a statutory annual calendar that leaves little room for a delayed cutover
- Justice case management shared by the sheriff, district attorney, public defender, and probation, with courts that are a separate branch of government rather than a county department
- Eligibility, child welfare, child support, and behavioral health systems that interface with or run on state platforms, where the state controls the release schedule and the interface specification
- ERP and payroll replacements that touch every department, plus labor agreements that encode how pay is actually calculated
- Long-lived legacy applications whose business rules exist only in code and in the memory of a few staff close to retirement
- Federal financial participation that brings advance planning, procurement, reporting, and cost allocation obligations the county's normal purchasing process was not built to produce
- Board of supervisors approval for contracts and change orders, on a public agenda, inside a budget cycle that does not bend to a vendor's schedule
Where HQT helps
- Requirements developed with each department that has a stake, written to be testable and traceable to statute, program rules, and state interface specifications
- Current state and target architecture across departments: integrations, data flows, identity, hosting, and a clear statement of which interfaces the county does not control
- RFP content including scope, technical and security requirements, evaluation criteria, scoring guides, and demonstration scripts built on the county's own cases rather than the vendor's
- Vendor evaluation support: reference checks with questions worth asking, cost models normalized so proposals can be compared, and the analysis that separates configuration from custom development
- Contract exhibits that decide who pays when things slip, covering deliverable definitions, acceptance criteria, service levels, data ownership and export, and change control
- Owner's technical representative services during implementation, including deliverable review, risk tracking, change request analysis, conversion and reconciliation validation, and an independent go-live readiness assessment
- Independent verification and validation and project management support, with findings reported by severity and status packaged for a steering committee, an oversight body, and the board
How an engagement usually starts
The usual trigger is a decision that has already been made. A board approves funding for a replacement and the county needs requirements and a solicitation before the fiscal year closes. A funding agency's planning document commits the county to independent verification and validation, and the county has to name someone independent to perform it. Or an implementation is slipping, the vendor and the county disagree about why, and the CIO wants an outside read before the next board meeting.
The first step is reading rather than advising. That means the feasibility study or planning document, the contract and its exhibits, the deliverables accepted so far, the current schedule and risk register, and the interface agreements with state systems, followed by interviews with the department leads who will live with the result. What comes out of that is a written assessment: what the county has committed to, where the real exposure sits, and a recommended scope of support with the dependencies named. HQT does not resell the platforms it helps evaluate, and does not bid on implementation work under solicitations it helped write. Verification and validation work has no value without that separation, so it is stated in the engagement agreement rather than left as an understanding.