Case Analysis: Clark County Family Services

Company Background

In 2004, Clark County Department of Family Services was given responsibility for all child welfare, foster care and adoption services in the county. As part of a federal improvement plan for the State of Nevada, the department also needed to be able to comply with rigorous reporting requirements. To gain a true overview of performance and manage workload effectively, it would be necessary to unite data from numerous systems into a single source. With a growing population and an increasing case-load, the demand for easily accessible data became even more acute.

It was critical to find a solution that could extend the investment in the ERP and GIS applications, could scale quickly to support all functional areas, and included a broad range of capabilities for metrics, dashboards, reports, analysis, and self-service information access. A crucial element in this initiative would be to make the solution easy for non-technical users to work with - moving workload away from the central IT team and enabling different business areas to serve themselves with information.

After a rigorous selection process, Clark County decided to implement a business analytics solution that would provide a single source for all family servicesrelated data. The purpose was to enable users to gain deeper insight into key operational areas such as intake, placement, investigations, permits, adoption, court visits, eligibility for funding, payments, recruitment and training.

Users within each of these operational areas can now answer the key questions that support their day-to-day decisions. For example, members of the intake team can instantly view key metrics such as how many referrals have been made on the child services hotline, how many of them need to be investigated, and how many can be ruled out. Almost 100 percent of these analyses are now handled by the departmental users themselves, with no need to ask for help from the IT team.

Clark County implemented a phased deployment of business analytics technologies to meet both immediate business needs and long-term goals. The initiative started with the creation of a project team that represented user across the whole organization, at every level from report-writers to senior executives. This team set the key objectives - implement the business analytics solution to deliver the required capabilities for metrics, dashboards, reporting, analysis and self-service information delivery. The solution would extend the investments in the SAP ERP and GIS applications, support and data warehouse architecture, and be architected for rapid, enterprisewide deployments. PerformanceG2 was chosen to translate the wide range of business requirements into the business analytics solution.

The first phase of the implementation involved business-led prioritization. Creating scorecards and metrics with underlying OLAP cubes for the intake, placement and investigation teams were among the first objectives. These helped managers not only monitor performance more effectively but also drill down to investigate underlying root causes. Phase two built on the experience of the first phase. A change in emphasis at the senior management level led to an increased focus on creating a more comprehensive data warehouse. At phase completion, information access was extended to every functional area across the department. Business users had self-service access to information, and were able to develop reports for themselves without IT assistance. The development of the data warehouse supports data demands. Today, the culture has shifted and nearly 100 percent of the department's reports are created and managed entirely by business users.

Questions

1. What type of analytics solution is needed? Identify the opportunity for an analytics solution and explain why this solution is feasible.
2. Identify the source of data for the analytics solution needed.
3. Who are the business users?
4. What problems should be addressed by the solution?
5. Explain the analytics solution implementation flow for this case.