Accelerating Government Transformation For A Digital Society

How Tennessee is modernizing state government with AI and a "no wrong door" approach

Every state agency is under the same pressure right now: keep legacy systems running while constituents expect the same speed and personalization they get from private companies. In this conversation with Scoop News Group, Tennessee CIO Kristen Darby and WWT's John Evans get specific about what that looks like in practice, from grants management to call centers to the mainframes still running underneath it all.

What this conversation covers

• Why modernization should begin with the mission, not the technology
• How an enterprise approach helps agencies do more with fewer resources
• What Tennessee's AI pilots have delivered so far, from call centers to document processing
• Why legacy mainframe modernization means rethinking the business logic, not just the code
• How "no wrong door" reshapes government services around the citizen instead of the agency
• What role a systems integrator plays in accelerating transformation safely
• Why workforce readiness, governance and change management matter as much as the technology itself

Tennessee's AI pilots are delivering

Call centers are one of the clearest examples Tennessee points to, since it's often the first touch point when a constituent already needs help. With more than 20 pilots now underway, Darby shares where the early results are showing up, and why her team is watching outcomes as closely as speed.

Rethinking legacy mainframe modernization

The common approach to modernizing old mainframe code is to feed it into an AI system and ask for a straight refactor into a modern language. Evans walks through why WWT's team takes an extra step first: extracting the underlying business logic, finding where the process itself has waste built in, and improving that logic before any code gets rewritten. Watch the full conversation to hear how that approach plays out in practice.