Executive Interview Series: Moneesh Arora, CEO of gWorks

At Keyhole Software, we spend a lot of time thinking about what it takes to modernize legacy systems for organizations where the stakes are high and the margin for error is low. Few sectors fit that profile better than local government.

We recently sat down with Moneesh Arora, CEO of gWorks, the top-ranked cloud software platform built for municipalities, counties, and utility districts under 50,000 population. Moneesh shared his perspective on why public-sector modernization requires a fundamentally different approach, and what agencies can realistically expect when they make the move.

Q: Many municipalities are still running on disconnected tools or legacy software that is 15 to 20 years old. What makes modernization so difficult for local governments?

A: Modernizing local government software is hard because the people running these systems are stretched thin. In a small agency, the person handling utility billing is often the same person taking meeting minutes, answering permit questions, and closing out payroll. There’s no IT department down the hall. So when someone proposes replacing the software that keeps the lights on, they aren’t weighing features. They’re weighing risk, and it’s their name on it if something breaks the week payments are due. That’s the real barrier. Every director and administrator we talk to asks the same question in some form: how do we keep serving residents while we change the system underneath them? At gWorks, if your answer to that question doesn’t come first, before you ever mention the product, you’ve already lost the room. That’s why we design our implementation, support, and onboarding around that concern from day one.

Q: How does gWorks structure its implementation process to address that concern?

A: gWorks structures its implementation for agencies that don’t have a dedicated technology staff, because most local governments under 50,000 people don’t have one. That single fact shapes the entire process. We run the current process and the new one side by side during the transition, so services never stop while the change happens. Agencies get named support contacts they can call directly instead of a ticket that disappears into a queue. And we configure the software to match how the agency already works, rather than forcing them to rebuild their week around us. Migration is the other half of it. We’ve moved agencies off nearly every kind of system, from regional desktop products to older on-premises software, so when a city leaves a platform they’ve run for fifteen years, we’re not learning on their data. We’ve done this many times, and that experience is what keeps disruption to a minimum.

Keyhole Perspective: Moneesh’s point about running the old and new systems side by side is a pattern we see across modernization projects well beyond local government. Whenever a system is genuinely load-bearing, whether it’s payroll, a hospital’s patient records, or a manufacturer’s order pipeline, the riskiest moment isn’t choosing new software. It’s the cutover. Parallel operation, clear ownership on both sides of the transition, and configuring the new system to match existing workflows rather than demanding a workflow change all reduce that risk. The technology decision tends to get the attention, but the transition plan is usually what determines whether the project actually succeeds.

Q: What outcomes tend to show up first after an agency modernizes its public works or operations systems?

A: The first outcome agencies notice after modernizing is visibility. A public works director can finally see every open work order, the full asset history, and every crew assignment in one place, so decisions that used to take several phone calls now take seconds. On the operations side, agencies start catching deferred maintenance before it becomes an emergency, which is the difference between scheduling a repair and paying for a failure. FEMA reimbursement documentation gets cleaner too, so after a storm an agency is positioned to actually recover those costs instead of losing them to incomplete records. Fleet management shifts from reactive to proactive. The outcome that matters most, though, is trust. Those early wins are what build confidence across the organization, and drives adoption beyond the first department willing to take the leap.

Q: You serve communities across a wide range of states and jurisdictions. What’s the most consistent product design lesson you’ve drawn from that experience?

A: The most consistent lesson we’ve learned building software for local government is that every unnecessary click has a real cost, and that cost is a person’s time. When the same clerk handles permits, payroll questions, and the council agenda before lunch, you cannot make them stop and think about the software. The most configurable system is seldom the most useful one. What agencies actually need is software built for local government out of the box, software that already understands fund accounting, already accounts for the budget cycle, and already handles the 811 dig-safety rules that vary from state to state, while staying flexible enough to fit how a particular town operates. When the platform absorbs that complexity, the staff never has to. That’s the whole point: put the hard parts inside the product so the people using it can just do their jobs.

Keyhole Perspective: This is a principle that holds well beyond municipal software. A platform that tries to be configurable enough for everyone usually ends up being distinctive for no one, because every configuration option is a decision the user has to make instead of the software making it for them. The strongest domain-specific software absorbs the complexity of a field, whether that’s fund accounting for a city or claims processing for an insurer, so the people using it can focus on their actual work instead of configuring the tool. Flexibility still matters, but it works best sitting on top of sensible defaults rather than replacing them.

Q: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for local government technology over the next few years?

A: The biggest opportunity in local government technology over the next few years is consolidation. Right now, many small municipalities still run core operations on paper, or stitch together separate systems for asset management, utility billing, GIS, and financial reporting. Either way, the result is the same: gaps in the data that make decisions harder, and staff losing hours to manual reconciliation. The agencies that bring all of that into a single integrated platform will have a meaningful efficiency advantage, and they’ll be far better prepared for the state and federal reporting requirements that keep growing every year. What excites me most is this. The technology now exists to give a town of 8,000 the same operational clarity a large city has always been able to afford. That gap used to be a fact of life for small communities. It no longer has to be, and closing it is exactly what we’re building toward.

To learn more about gWorks and their cloud-based platform for municipalities, counties, and utility districts, visit gworks.com.