The most effective modernization efforts are defined by how well the technology fits into the workflows of the people using it every day.
That was a central theme of our panel at the American Public Human Services Association’s (APHSA) 2026 IT Solutions Management for Human Services (ISM) Conference. Leaders from Clark County Department of Social Services and South Dakota Department of Social Services joined the Cúram team to share how their organizations collaborated with Cúram product, design, and engineering teams to help shape Cúram Action View, a new solution designed to bring together client information, benefits, interactions, and next steps in a single place.
Their experience demonstrates why involving frontline staff throughout the modernization process leads to better outcomes for agencies, caseworkers, and the people they serve.
Health and human services agencies face increasing workloads, evolving regulations, workforce challenges, and growing expectations from their communities. Technology investments must do more than introduce new capabilities. They must make work easier and more effective for the people using the technology every day.
That was one of the reasons Clark County and South Dakota chose to participate in the initiative. Rather than waiting until a solution was fully designed, they wanted an opportunity to influence how it evolved. Their goals included improving usability, streamlining workflows, increasing productivity, and ensuring the experience reflected how caseworkers actually work.
Their experience reinforced an important lesson: the people closest to the work often have the clearest view of what needs to improve. When caseworkers are brought into the modernization process early, agencies gain insights that are difficult to uncover through requirements gathering alone. They can identify workflow challenges, validate assumptions, and help guide decisions before they become expensive to change.
Just as importantly, involving frontline staff creates stronger ownership in the outcome. Modernization is easier when the people who will ultimately use the solution have had a role in shaping it. Rather than being implemented for caseworkers, change is developed with them.
The participating agencies and Cúram teams used site visits, workflow walkthroughs, virtual sessions, and direct engagement with caseworkers to understand day-to-day work. They examined how staff move through processes, what information they rely on, where delays occur, and which tasks consume the most time and attention.
This work surfaced patterns that extended across agencies. Case notes consistently emerged as a critical part of daily work, reinforcing the need to make important information easier to access and act on. Evidence management was another common challenge, highlighting opportunities to simplify how information is collected, reviewed, and verified.
These insights did not come from asking caseworkers to produce a list of desired features. Instead, they came from observing how services are delivered and understanding where existing processes create friction.
For agencies pursuing modernization, the takeaway is straightforward: understand the work before redesigning the technology. Direct insight into how caseworkers serve clients can reveal needs and opportunities that may not appear in a conventional requirements document.
Engagement should not end once requirements have been gathered or workflows have been documented. Caseworkers need meaningful opportunities to shape the solution as it moves through design, development, and testing.
Caseworkers participated in recurring prototype reviews and provided feedback on workflows, navigation, information presentation, and usability. Their input influenced decisions ranging from how information was organized to how actions appeared within the experience. As prototypes evolved, participants could see how earlier feedback had informed later iterations.
The agencies also validated capabilities in their own environments using real data and real-world scenarios. This helped uncover deployment considerations, integration questions, data issues, and workflow nuances that would have been more difficult to identify in a controlled setting.
This is also an important part of how Cúram works with customers. Product, design, and engineering teams engage directly with agencies and frontline users, test ideas in the context of real program delivery, and carry that feedback through the product development process. The goal is to create a sustained working relationship in which customers can see how their experience is shaping the solution.
That continuity builds trust. It also creates stronger advocates for change because participants know their input has been heard, considered, and reflected in the product. As agencies move toward implementation, those participants often become champions for the new approach, helping their colleagues understand the value of the change and supporting adoption across the organization.
Modernization gives agencies an opportunity to evaluate the workflow itself. Recreating an existing process in a new interface may produce a more current system, but it can leave many of the underlying challenges intact.
The larger opportunity is to remove unnecessary steps, simplify navigation, reduce context switching, and make essential information easier to find and use. Success should be measured by whether the new experience helps caseworkers perform their work more effectively, not simply whether a new technology has been deployed.
That perspective influenced how the participating agencies thought about measurement. In addition to adoption, they plan to consider application processing times, renewal efficiency, task completion timelines, and feedback from frontline staff. These measures can help determine whether modernization is producing meaningful operational improvements.
The same principle applies to emerging technologies such as AI. Case summarization, guided responses, and next-best-action recommendations may improve productivity, but their value depends on how well they support the broader workflow. If the underlying experience is broken, AI just makes a bad experience happen faster. Agencies need to begin with the work, the people performing it, and the outcomes they are trying to improve.
Clark County, South Dakota, and Cúram approached modernization as a collaborative effort rather than a technology implementation. By bringing together frontline staff, agency leaders, and product teams throughout the process, they were able to shape a solution informed by real workflows, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
Their experience offers an important reminder for agencies planning future modernization initiatives: the best solutions are rarely designed in isolation. They emerge through continuous collaboration between the people delivering services, the organizations leading change, and the partners helping bring that vision to life. When those perspectives come together, modernization becomes an opportunity to improve how work gets done and better support the people who rely on those services every day.