UrbanTechDC — Data Migration as a Service & safe AI adoption.

The Problem

Choosing the new platform is the easy part.

The contract is signed. The implementation partner is booked. The go-live date is on a slide somewhere. Then someone asks the question nobody owns: how do fifteen years of records, notes, attachments, and relationships actually get from the old system into the new one?

The usual answers are all bad. Export everything to CSV and hope. Hand it to the implementation partner, who prices it hourly because they'll figure it out as they go. Or keep the old system running read-only "just for a while," which quietly becomes forever, at full license cost.

Meanwhile, your staff are already using AI tools. Usually free ones, usually on personal accounts, usually with no policy about what's safe to paste in.

We fix both. The migration nobody wants to own, and the AI question your board is going to ask.

What We Do

1. Data Migration as a Service

We gather everything out of the system you're leaving and stand it up clean in the system you're moving to. Records, history, attachments, custom fields, and the relationships between them. This is the part of a platform change that sinks timelines, and it's the part we do for a living.

The moves we make. A healthcare provider taking case and incident data from ServiceNow into Salesforce. A membership organization leaving a legacy SaaS product for a custom application built around its real process. Three donor databases from three merged programs consolidated into one. An on-premise system nobody supports anymore into something modern. The platforms change; the discipline doesn't.

Why us. Most migrations are run as a spreadsheet exercise by whoever is standing closest. We treat them as an engineering problem: a full inventory of the source, a field-by-field mapping to the target, and repeatable dry runs against real data before anything touches production. We are not reselling you the destination platform, so we have no reason to tell you the data will "mostly come over fine."

How it works. We start with a paid discovery for a fixed fee: a data inventory of the source system, a written field-level mapping to the target, and a sample migration of a real subset your team can open and inspect. You see exactly what lands and what doesn't before you commit to the full move. If the sample doesn't earn the next step, you keep the inventory and mapping and we part as friends.

What you get. The full migration, run as a rehearsed cutover rather than a hopeful weekend. Every record accounted for, a reconciliation report proving source counts match target counts, history and attachments preserved, documented mapping your team keeps, and a rollback plan we never expect to use.

What it costs. A fixed fee for discovery, quoted after the first conversation. The migration itself is priced on the scope of the work — source systems, record volume, how ugly the legacy data is — and quoted as a fixed number before we start. Not hourly. The vendor who bills by the hour has no reason to make your data easy.

2. AI, adopted properly

This engagement starts with your leadership, because AI adoption is a culture decision before it's a technology decision.

The question is not whether your staff will use AI. Most already do. The question is whether it happens with your knowledge, your policies, and your data protected, or without them.

How it works. We start with a working session with you and your leadership on three things: what's sacred (donor data, case notes, anything that must never touch a public tool), what's permitted, and what the freed time is for. One question we always ask: if this gives your program staff back six hours a week, what do you want those hours going toward? Your answer becomes the design brief.

What you get. A fixed-fee engagement, a few weeks long, that ends with: a written AI policy your board can read, an approved set of tools configured for your organization, staff trained on what's safe and what's useful, and a named internal champion who keeps it alive after we leave.

What it costs. A fixed fee, quoted after the first conversation. No subscription required. Many clients start here.

For your board

The questions we expect from a careful reader.

A board doing due diligence on a vendor that will handle a full copy of your organization's data asks a specific set of questions. Here are the answers, in writing, before the call.

Who builds it

UrbanTechDC is led by Matt Webster, a DC-based technology executive with two decades of experience building and operating software for federal and commercial clients. The firm is registered in the District of Columbia and is in the process of CBE certification.

You can verify the principal's background through public sources before the first call. We expect this and welcome it.

Where data lives during a migration

A migration means we hold a working copy of your data. It stays in US-region data centers, encrypted in transit and at rest, in an environment dedicated to your engagement and never shared across clients. Access is logged and limited to named principals.

When the migration is signed off, the working copies and staging environments are destroyed on a defined schedule, and you get written confirmation that it happened. You receive a data handling summary before we take the first extract, and a standard mutual NDA covers the scoping conversation.

If the firm is unavailable

If UrbanTechDC ceases to operate for any reason, everything we built for you transfers to your team or your designated successor at no fee: migration scripts, field mappings, transformation logic, and the source code of any application we built. Your data is exportable in standard formats at any time, on request. Hosting configuration and operational documentation transfer with the code, so a successor can finish the move or take over the running system.

These commitments are in the contract, and we'll send the relevant clauses before any commercial conversation.

If you choose to leave

You receive a complete data export in standard formats. There is no termination fee and no minimum term beyond the current month.

A forced exit deserves more support than a chosen one; the contract reflects that distinction on purpose.

Is this you?

This is you if:

✓ You're moving to a new platform, or you've already started and the data is the part that's stuck.
✓ You have years of history — records, attachments, notes, relationships — that has to survive the move intact.
✓ Someone has proposed exporting it all to CSV, and you would like a better plan than that.
✓ Your board is asking, or will soon ask, what your AI policy is.
✓ You're willing to start with a paid, fixed-fee engagement before anything long-term.

This isn't you if:

— You want the cheapest possible export and you'll accept whatever lands.
— You want one vendor to sell you the destination platform and migrate you onto it. We don't resell, on purpose.
— You need someone embedded in your team as ongoing fractional engineering.

What we don't do

We don't resell platforms, so we earn nothing on where you land. We don't do staff augmentation. We don't do fractional CTO retainers. We don't do hourly consulting. We migrate, we build, we host, we maintain, and we expand by project. If you need someone embedded in your team, we're the wrong fit, and we'll tell you so on the first call.

Get Started

Tell us one thing.

Either the system you're leaving and the one you're moving to, or the AI question your board is going to ask you. A sentence is fine. We don't need record counts or budget figures yet. We'll come back with a clear next step and a short list of clarifying questions. Most replies arrive within two business days.

Move your data to a new system with nothing lost.