Abstract
This thesis examines the challenge large financial institutions face in maintaining operational stability while adapting to rapid technological change, drawing on internship experience at Wells Fargo. It focuses on how decades-old legacy systems, built on outdated codebases, create inefficiencies that slow development, limit usability, and delay innovation. Modernizing systems that have been in place for decades requires coordination across technical teams, management, and other stakeholders, making it important to understand how these social groups shape the design process itself. To analyze this sociotechnical dynamic, the project draws on the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, examining how differing stakeholder perspectives, such as developers prioritizing flexibility and management emphasizing risk mitigation, shape design decisions during system modernization. The thesis also uses the failed 2013 rollout of Healthcare.gov as a case study to show how competing stakeholder interpretations can influence system design outcomes and contribute to large-scale implementation challenges. This work argues that addressing legacy system modernization requires attention to both technical and social dimensions, since focusing only on technical upgrades without considering institutional priorities and collaboration risks repeating past inefficiencies. In particular, it explores the transition to modern front-end frameworks such as React and the use of RESTful APIs to improve scalability, performance, and accessibility, ultimately advancing two connected proposals: a technical project for implementing a modernized internal web system in financial institutions and an STS analysis using SCOT to examine how stakeholder interactions shape the success or failure of large-scale system transformations.
