Enterprise Forms Platform

What started as a single W-9 form request from legal and finance teams revealed a much larger organizational need. When I met with stakeholders, a recurring theme emerged: "The W-9 is just one of many forms we need." They articulated wanting Formstack-like ease of use — rapid idea to implementation for any form.

Three separate problems converged: many business use cases required Smartsheet for data collection, storage, and year-over-year porting, but the organization was trying to deprecate Smartsheet at over $200K per year across the org. Separately, a legacy "Registrations Management" application (8 years old) used by the legal department had reached end of life and couldn't handle year-over-year data well. And teams across the organization needed an easy way to create, deploy, and manage forms without developer involvement.

Extensive research into enterprise form architecture informed the design. I gathered all requirements, key fields, and functions from across the stakeholder groups. The critical strategic insight was: instead of building one form, build a platform that solves all three problems simultaneously — the immediate form need, the Smartsheet dependency, and the legacy Registrations application.

The platform was designed so that different teams could set up individual forms using an easy-to-use form builder UI, manage their own templates and notification workflows, with team-level autonomy and organization-level admin oversight from the technology and legal teams.

Building a full platform rather than a point solution was the right call because the cost avoidance alone ($200K+/year in Smartsheet licensing) justified the investment, and solving three problems with one build dramatically increased ROI. The architecture prioritizes PII security (field-level encryption with AES-256-GCM), immutable form versioning, and multiple data storage pathways depending on sensitivity level.

This project is also the proof point for the DTS Rapid Development Playbook methodology — achieving 30% completion in approximately two weeks, which "by far exceeds any standard historical development process and timeline significantly."

Tech Stack: Next.js 15 App Router + React 19 + Tailwind CSS 4 + Shadcn/ui (frontend), Next.js API Routes + Prisma ORM (backend), PostgreSQL 16, AWS S3 (MinIO locally), AWS SES (Mailpit locally), OneLogin OIDC auth.

• ~30% complete in approximately two weeks of building
• On track to eliminate $200K+/year Smartsheet dependency
• Replaces 8-year-old legacy Registrations Management application
• Provides organization-wide self-service form creation and management
• Proof point for the Rapid Development methodology
• Demonstrates strategic thinking: one build solving three organizational problems