Massachusetts Social Services and Information Technology - Case Study Example

? Massachusetts social services and information technology Information Systems has improved the value and efficiency of services in many organizations. Since its inception, many organizations, government ministries and private business have adopted Information systems projects to increase efficiency in services they offer. However, research indicate that most of the implementation f these projects usually fail or most of them are cancelled. The case presented here is the acquisition of funding for Information Systems’ projects funding. The agency’s funding would come from the federal government, which would be a 50% of the over all costs reimbursement. In addition to his, the state legislature would pass a bond for Information Technology, which the agency targeted. In order to receive it, the agency must submit a justification request for the fund, which included an examination of both the two failed projects. The first failed project had a $20 million budget while the second one, still under development, had a $32 million budget. The state legislature approved the funding, giving the agency an obligation of ensuring this project succeeded. In order to do this, they analyzed the agency’s services, organizational culture and the current challenges that developers may face (Garson, 2006). One such project is the Information systems’ project at the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which is an agency branch for Health and Human Services. This department deals with complex, unstructured and a large amount of information including tracking recipients of services, welfare benefits applications, scanning fingerprints and electronic benefits card issuing. In addition to this, Policies in the federal governments constantly change, at least four times in a year thus affecting any rule that already exists. The agency provides aid to families in different ways including childcare, food stamps, and families with dependent children, emergency aid to children, disabled and the elderly, emergency assistance, supplemental security income, and employment services program. Because of the variety of these services, social workers, as well as clients move from one place to another, meeting different people in order to receive services. The processes are complicated and tiresome. In addition to these, social workers must ensure that benefiters are genuine and deserving of the services by racking their backgrounds and history of benefits. The organizational realized that an effective ay of dealing with these problems would be adopting an Information system, which would facilitate speed and make duties of the social workers easy. The system would store client information and make tracking them easy. All information systems projects require feasibility studies that examine the possibility of their successes. Failure to carry out these studies or poorly carried out feasibility studies leads to failures of projects. Poor feasibility studies lead to poor planning, documentation, staffing, budgeting, and scheduling. In addition to these, other issues such as organizational and cultural issues, as well as under estimation of scope and complexities are contributing factors to the failure. The planning and management team in the initial project failed to plan for the system. The system developers designed and documented it poorly. In addition to this, system was written in COBOL, which is difficult to understand and document. To ensure success of this project, the agency’s management The state governor appoints a commissioner who heads the agency’s department. At the initial stages of the project, the commissioner was an employee from the career department from Field and Eligibility operations. A deputy commissioner was also appointed, from the Field and Eligibility Operations. The department has positions for administration and finance, procedure and program management and MIS, policy, who are all appointed from the Field and Eligibility Operations. These positions are political appointees, therefore, subject to changes due to political changes. Other employees are civil servants hence protected from executive administrative changes that may result from political forces. In addition to this, the employees belong to employee bargaining unions, which protect them from terminations and lay off. In case the agency y needs to terminate employment of an employee, it goes through a lot of processes and documentations, which usually takes almost a year to complete. This culture makes it difficult to lay off employment, thus employees remain relaxed in their duties. Because this, they may not accept new systems such as the Information System, which influences changes. Employees also resist change due to the poor motivations. The management faces problems motivating their employees because the state legislature determines he employees’ salaries. The legislature placed a 6% maximum pay increase for all employees. The department also has older employees who are not enthusiastic about technological change. The ideal employee for this system would be below the age of thirty five, the employees had low job morale and poor training (Basset, 1997). The new project’s vision was implementing a multitier and server architecture, which would be independent of the state’s mainframe computers. This server enables an approach that includes a client as well as other servers linked together by special software and network. it enables communication between servers and clients, and at the same time, provides a flexible technological framework. The project would perform the following functions; providing an improved interface containing information on the State Medical agency’s system, and department for child support system and facilitating direct deposits and electronic benefit transfer. The project’s implementation is expected to include certain components such as a component for an integrated interactive interview. The project designers would also design it in such a way that it determines eligibility in all programs. Additionally, it would have a client-based architecture and support ad hoc reporting (Poulin, 1997). Six months into the project, the first facilitator resigned, and the new facilitator ascertained that the projects models were unusable for the design. Because of this, the facilitator together with team members came up with a proposal to the technical director. The proposal contained information regarding the software industry and their use of experts systems. The team recommended that the management should adopt a rule based technology and modeling tool for BAA02. The technical director of the department accepted this recommendation, though noted that BAA02’s initial facilitator had stated that this tool was unusable. to solve the problems of manpower and skills, the assistant commissioner started hiring professional people to work with the new system. The commissioner did with the help of stakeholder’s recommendations. During this exercise, the commissioner gave middle level managers with no training in Information systems jobs outside system development. The commissioner hired new managers who could work well with the new system to replace the ones removed. This was an attempt to have an efficient and maintainable solution to the IS problems in the department. In addition to this, the commissioner requested the team to use an Information Engineering Methodology while developing the project. The team had never used this methodology to develop a system before, therefore, anticipated problems. Additionally, the team had no prior training on the methodology and this made them unsure of it results. The commissioner did not give the project a mandate to place business-reengineering process in order. Instead, the commissioner offered them a mandate directing them to do what was possible. The federal government was also unwilling to take more action on the project other than provide cursory reviews. These were some of the problems the project team faced in its attempt to implement the new system. References Basset, P. G. (1997). Framming Software Reuse. New York: Yourdon. Garson, G. D. (2006). Public Information Technology and E-governance. New York: Jones and Bartlett Press. Poulin, J. S. (1997). Measuring Software Reuse: Principles, and economic models. New York: Addison Wesley. Read More