Uncharted Worlds / est. 1995 Sydney  ·  +61 407 229 002

Legacy SAS migration & numerical assurance

I retire legacy analytics platforms — and prove the numbers still hold.

Michael Charters. Thirty-five years in regulated data. Accredited supplier to the NSW Government for ICT Services.

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Parallel run · cycle 14WC pricing
Legacy
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Replacement
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Variance — Within tolerance

This is the moment every migration is judged on. Not whether the code converted — whether the numbers agree, and whether anyone will sign that they do.

The problem

Converting the code is the easy half.

Most organisations planning to retire a SAS estate cannot answer three questions with confidence: what is actually in there, what depends on it, and what it will genuinely cost to move.

The estate has usually grown over fifteen or twenty years. Documentation is partial or gone. The people who wrote it have left. Conversion tools will quote on line counts — but line counts do not tell you which lines feed a regulator-facing number, which variables have no equivalent in the target platform, or where the reconciliation will fail six months in.

These programs rarely fail at translation. They fail at validation — at the moment an actuary, a risk committee or an external auditor asks how anyone knows the new numbers match the old ones. By then the budget is committed.

That question is what I answer.

Representative work

Major Australian general insurer

Actuarial pricing platform migration

A twenty-year-old, undocumented workers compensation actuarial pricing system running against a legacy mainframe warehouse that was being retired. Pricing outcomes had to stay defensible to auditors throughout.

I reverse-engineered two decades of undocumented SAS, mapped it to the replacement platform in SQL Server, built the ETL, and designed and ran the parallel-run cycles — verified by internal actuaries and executives and by external audit.

Old-versus-new pricing outcomes came in within tolerance. The program was signed off. The code ran clean in production through every monthly cycle after project close.

This was a multi-year, multi-million-dollar transformation program on which several external provider arrangements were restructured and stood down during delivery. I was retained to completion, and my final deliverable was presented to senior management and led to sign-off.

14
UAT cycles
7 months
Parallel running
1
Developer

Australian Dept of Veterans’ Affairs

Matching 27 million pharmaceutical records

Pharmaceutical claim data moves between Veterans’ Affairs and Medicare at enormous volume. I wrote the extraction and reporting behind the matching of 27 million records representing $1 billion in payments — agreed to the penny.

Alongside it, I consolidated three years of pharmacy data feeds — applying business rules that automated the elimination of historical redundancy — and compiled ten years of pharmaceutical data from disparate sources into research extracts for an independent university study.

Delivered across mainframe SAS, COBOL, IMS DB/DC, DB2 and JCL, co-ordinated with Medicare Australia and the department’s data warehousing and medication management functions.

27M
Records
$1B
In payments
To the penny
Agreement

Fixed-price engagement

SAS Estate Discovery & Migration Readiness Assessment

$48,000 + GST
Four weeks  ·  Fixed  ·  No variation without written scope change

Before you commit a budget, you get an accurate picture of what you are actually moving — and an honest estimate rather than an optimistic one.

It stands alone. Take the findings and run the migration internally, or put them to another provider, and the engagement has done its job.

NSW Government buyers: Uncharted Worlds Pty Ltd is an accredited supplier under the ICT Services Scheme. This engagement sits below the threshold at which agencies may negotiate directly with an accredited supplier.
  1. 01Program and job inventory — every program, macro, stored process and scheduled job, including the orphaned and dormant code
  2. 02Dependency and data lineage map — source system through to final report
  3. 03Variable-level gap analysis against your target platform, with regulatory-significant gaps flagged individually
  4. 04Ranked risk register, with the showstoppers named explicitly
  5. 05Costed migration options, including partial retirement where a full migration is not justified
  6. 06Reconciliation and tolerance strategy — how equivalence gets proven, how many cycles to budget, and who has to sign it
  7. 07Executive summary and a walkthrough for your steering committee

How I work

One accountable person, working remotely from Sydney.

Delivered by me personally. No subcontracting, no offshore component, no rotating team.

Engagements are delivered remotely from my office in Sydney, in Australian time zones. That is how the last comparable program ran — a seven-month migration for a nationally distributed team, including its directors, with no loss of pace or oversight. Remote delivery keeps more of the budget on the work.

What you are buying is someone who can read the system nobody documented — and who knows which parts of a machine-generated conversion to distrust before an auditor finds them.

Engagements are structured so the risk sits where it belongs. Discovery is fixed price. Design and build run against fixed milestones, priced from the discovery findings. Parallel-run cycles are charged per cycle, because cycle count is driven by your reviewers and auditors — so you keep control of that spend, and I carry no incentive to extend it.

Who does the work

Michael Charters

Thirty-five years inside enterprise data, most of it in regulated industries: general and workers compensation insurance, actuarial pricing, credit risk, life insurance and superannuation, government health, disability, pharmaceutical and justice data.

I started on mainframes in 1988 — SAS, COBOL, PL/I, IMS, JCL, DB2 — building investment and actuarial systems in Toronto before moving to Sydney. That background is not nostalgia. It is the reason I can open a twenty-year-old undocumented estate and work out what it actually does, rather than what its documentation claims.

I founded Uncharted Worlds in 1995 and have been its director since. Almost every engagement in my career has been delivered as an independent contract through it — QBE, the National Disability Insurance Agency, NSW Ministry of Health, OzTAM, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the NSW Department of Attorney General & Justice and Citibank among them.

I also work on the current side of this. I have built an end-to-end analytics platform on Google Cloud, I train and fine-tune large language models, and with a collaborator I built an engine that ingests NDIS and ACCC legislation and tests real provider data against it for compliance — the same assurance problem as a migration, pointed at statute instead of a calculation engine. I am part-way through a Master of Biostatistics at the University of Sydney.

AI has moved the scarce skill from writing the new code to validating it. That is the work I take on.

Common questions

What buyers usually ask.

What does a SAS estate discovery assessment involve?
Four weeks producing a full inventory of every program, macro, stored process and scheduled job; a dependency and data lineage map; a variable-level gap analysis against your target platform; a ranked risk register; costed migration options; and a reconciliation strategy setting out how equivalence will be proven and who has to sign it off.
How much does the assessment cost?
$48,000 plus GST, fixed. Four weeks from the date access is granted. Not subject to variation unless scope is changed in writing.
Can NSW Government agencies engage Uncharted Worlds directly?
Yes. Uncharted Worlds Pty Ltd is an accredited supplier under the NSW Government ICT Services Scheme, and this engagement sits below the threshold at which agencies may negotiate directly with an accredited supplier rather than going to market.
We already have a code conversion tool. What does this add?
Conversion tools translate code. They do not tell you which lines feed a regulator-facing number, which variables have no equivalent in the target platform, or how you will prove to an auditor that the new outputs match the old ones. These programs rarely fail at translation. They fail at validation.
Our SAS estate is very large. Does the fixed price still hold?
For most estates, yes. The four-week scope is built around what a typical departmental or business-unit estate contains. For unusually large or federated estates I run a short no-cost sizing call first and confirm the fee before anything is committed — you will never receive a variation you did not agree in writing. If you do not know how big your estate is, that is normal, and it is one of the things the assessment answers.
Do you work remotely?
Remote delivery from Sydney is how I work. The most recent comparable program ran entirely remotely across a nationally distributed team — including its directors — for seven months, through fourteen parallel-run cycles and external audit sign-off. I work in Australian time zones and am contactable through the working day.
Which clients do you take on?
NSW Government agencies, where Uncharted Worlds is an accredited supplier, and Australian federal agencies, where I have prior delivery history with Veterans’ Affairs and Human Services. Also regulated private-sector clients — insurers, banks and superannuation funds — running comparable SAS estates.
Who actually does the work?
Michael Charters, personally. No subcontracting, no offshore component, no rotating team.

Contact

Tell me what you are trying to retire.

If you have a SAS estate under review, a data platform migration in planning, or a legacy calculation engine nobody wants to touch, I am glad to talk it through — whether or not it turns into an engagement.

Email[email protected]
Phone+61 407 229 002
OfficeSurry Hills, Sydney NSW