Federal & Defense
Public software should be as good as the private kind.
Government software carries a burden commercial software doesn’t: nobody can choose a competitor. A system that takes forty minutes to complete isn’t a churn problem, it’s a citizen who gives up. We build to the standards this work demands (Section 508 and WCAG, plain language, FedRAMP-aligned boundaries, NIST 800-171 where CUI is in scope) and we build it to be genuinely usable. Two buyers sit on this page: federal agencies, and the defense-adjacent suppliers whose real question is evidence rather than software, a signed affirmation about systems that were never built to produce any. State, county and municipal government runs on different vehicles and a different clock and has its own page; public universities are a third reality, under Higher Education & Research.
What we hear
The problems that actually show up.
Not a market overview. These are the specific failures that bring people to us in this sector.
Systems that outlived their documentation
Mission-critical applications built decades ago, maintained by a shrinking group, and impossible to change quickly when policy does.
Accessibility treated as an audit item
Section 508 conformance retrofitted at the end costs several times what building to it would have, and the result is still worse.
Data trapped by agency boundary
The same citizen is a separate record in six systems, and every interaction starts by asking them for information the agency already has.
Authority to operate as a bottleneck
Security authorization arrives at the end as a gate rather than being engineered in, and delivery timelines absorb the shock.
A bid nobody can score
Past performance is the first thing evaluated and the one thing a new firm cannot manufacture. We do not have a federal record yet, so on federal work we expect to arrive as a subcontractor to a prime rather than lead a bid, and we will say which on the first call. If your acquisition strategy needs a prime with a scored record, that is a reason to use one.
What we build here
Systems we typically build in this sector.
Some of these are whole products; some are one screen that removed a week of manual work. Both count.
- Case management and eligibility determination workflows
- Grants management and sub-recipient reporting
- Records digitization and document intelligence pipelines
- Interagency data exchange and identity federation
- Mission dashboards and readiness reporting
- Modernization of COBOL, AS/400 and mainframe-era systems
Integrates with
The estate you already have.
We work through supported interfaces, not screen-scraping that breaks at the next upgrade.
Built to
The standards this sector answers to.
Engineered in from the start. Retrofitting conformance costs several times as much and produces a worse result.
Case studies
Work in this sector.
Further reading
Written up at length.
- Systems5 min read
Who is holding your mail
Your provider keeps the service running. Microsoft states in its own architecture documentation that the data inside it stays yours to protect, and the gap between those two facts is where mail-loss incidents live.
- Security5 min read
You cannot practice on somebody else's network
A range full of well-built generic scenarios teaches tool proficiency, which is real and which transfers. The decisions that go wrong during an actual incident are specific to one estate, and those are the ones a generic environment cannot rehearse.
- Strategy6 min read
Cited rather than ranked
An answer engine does not hand out positions. It retrieves passages, writes an answer and names the sources it leaned on, which makes the unit of work a section rather than a page and makes most of what is sold as AI SEO unmeasurable.
Services most used here
Sources
- 1.SP 800-171 Rev. 3: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations (opens in a new tab), NIST
- 2.32 CFR Part 170: Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program (opens in a new tab), Electronic Code of Federal Regulations
- 3.IT Accessibility Laws and Policies (opens in a new tab), Section508.gov
- 4.Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 (opens in a new tab), W3C,
Next step
Working in federal & defense?
Bring the specific failure, not a requirements document. Forty-five minutes and we’ll tell you what we’d do about it.
- Phone
- (214) 723-2510
- Reply
- A person replies, not a sequence: within one business day, from someone who would be on the engagement.