It used to be that Jeff Williams, an inspector with Virginia's Department of Social Services, would have to carry an armload of documents to every child day care center he inspected. Not only did he need a 72-page inspection form for each location, but he also took along a stack of paper containing more than 500 standards for regulating day care centers.
All of that changed earlier this year when inspectors began using the Division of Licensing Programs Help and Information Network system, known as Dolphin. Now Williams carries his entire caseload on a Fujitsu tablet computer running Microsoft's XP Handheld Edition operating system.
While inspecting a site, Williams can review the facility's history and past reports, verify that violations have been corrected, determine whether the facility complies with regulations, and print inspection reports from his portable printer. When he returns to his office, he is able to upload the results to the central database while downloading updates to his caseload.
"In the past, I might have had to go back to the office [after an inspection], but now I have my whole file cabinet with me," Williams said. "A lot of inspectors have found the new system easier than carrying the regulations around with them."
Virginia's Dolphin project embodies many of the latest trends in state and local human services. The five-year project by BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va., and its partner, Versa Management Systems Inc. of Toronto, uses commercial software and mobile technology to make it easier for inspectors to generate the reports necessary for the state to regulate the nearly 7,000 facilities that care for children and vulnerable adults.
Everyone on the customer side seems satisfied. The inspectors like it because they can enter data quickly and efficiently, and the department administrators like it because it provides better data for program research.
The project also illustrates another growing trend: For many projects, states are moving away from costly, customized solutions and toward the kind of affordable, modular system enhancements that can generate rapid and obvious returns on investment.
"States aren't looking for vendors to do the big-bang concept," said John Goggin, vice president and director of government strategies for Stamford, Conn.-based market research and consulting firm Meta Group Inc. "Instead, they're looking for best of breed [solutions]."
GROWING MARKET
Despite serious budget shortfalls among the states, spending on human services projects continues to grow because federal or state law mandates many programs, and they receive matching funds from the federal government.
"Most vendors are saying there's never been a better time for human services than now," said Rishi Sood, a principal analyst with market research firm Gartner Dataquest, Stamford, Conn. "The fact that human services continues to grow positively is quite spectacular, given the issues associated with state and local IT spending."
Gartner predicts that state and local spending on IT hardware, software and services for human services will grow from $7.12 billion in 2003 to $8.13 billion in 2006, an average annual growth rate of 4.5 percent.
The bulk of information technology spending for human services is associated with systems that support three large state programs: the welfare-to-work program known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), child services and child welfare.
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Other programs such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation, while not considered core human services programs, overlap heavily with these programs because they serve similar segments of the population.
While Gartner's overall outlook for the human services market is rosy, industry executives caution that states are still looking to save money where they can. Even with federal matching funds, the states may have to pay up to 50 percent of the cost for new IT systems, a considerable amount for projects that could run between $20 million and $50 million.
"The human services space ... is still an area where states need to pursue new solutions and projects, but it is not a free flow of money like homeland security," said Rick Wheeler, managing partner of Accenture Ltd.'s health and human services practice.
In the past, state governments shopping for a human services system were encouraged by the federal government to procure systems similar to those implemented successfully in other states, said Yvette Jackson, national lead for BearingPoint's health and human services. But today, states are looking to take an enterprisewide approach by making improvements one module at a time, she said.
"Rather than replacing one stovepipe with another, states are looking across the enterprise," she said.
The trend holds true for BearingPoint's Dolphin project for Virginia, as well as a two-year, $16 million contract the company won in September from Minnesota to improve the state's unemployment insurance system. Under the contract, the company will provide business process re-engineering and technology modernization services.
A pair of Accenture's human services projects also help illustrate this trend. The company recently unveiled two solutions that support an electronic child support system for the New Mexico Department of Human Services. One solution lets employers perform tasks and exchange information electronically, while the other enables parents to do similar tasks electronically.
Accenture also has installed a Web-enabled licensing and support system for the Texas Department of Protective and Licensing Services. It's designed to improve children's safety by Web-enabling the licensing system used to monitor the state's vast network of child care providers.
Covansys Inc., Farmington Hills, Mich., has made modifications to human services systems in Maryland and North Carolina that did not require deploying new systems. The company provided a Web-based front end for Maryland's child support enforcement system, and technical consultation, system enhancements and maintenance for systems in four divisions of the North Carolina Department of Human Services.
FORECASTING CHANGE
The state and local market is experiencing "a wholesale change in the way human services [organizations] look at project implementation," Sood said.
He said the technology for human services programs is moving rapidly toward case-specific, customer-driven applications built on scalable platforms that allow the same architecture to be used across different programs.
Sood said the trend is toward project enhancements that have a customer relationship management or enterprise resource management flavor to them.
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"This will continue to drive the changes taking place over the next five years, and make it a bright spot for continuing [state and local government] IT spending," he said.
Arvind Malhotra, senior vice president for Covansys' public sector, agreed. With most child support systems having reached maturity, Malhotra said the company is seeing a wave of second-generation, customer-service-type enhancement projects in the $1 million to $10 million range. "We're seeing that trend all over the country," he said.
A natural outgrowth of this trend is the desire of state and local customers to use commercial products for a wide variety of human services programs and applications, including eligibility determination, licensing and unemployment insurance, according to analysts and industry sources.
Human services "is not a sector that has seen a lot of packaged solutions of late, but is now showing an interest in them," Wheeler said.
From a long-term standpoint, integrators are eyeing opportunities for welfare outsourcing and for interstate child support enforcement.
While welfare eligibility outsourcing is not widely permitted, some states, such as Florida and Texas, are quickly moving in that direction. Several integrators, notably Accenture, ACS and EDS, are poised to capitalize on this opportunity as it unfolds over the next several years.
Integrators also see future opportunities centered on the data shared by states that is related to child support enforcement, said John Engler, president of EDS' state and local government business. States want to make sure that parents who are responsible for paying child support do so even if they live in another state. With the increasing number of single-parent homes, a growth opportunity exists for integrators to help states collect child support enforcement across their borders, he said.
"There are so many people that are mobile now," he said. "There is an opportunity for the bigger companies to look at how to do that linkage better."
Staff Writer William Welsh can be reached at wwelsh@postnewsweek
tech.com.
