DISCUSSION
On November 15, 2017, the California Department of Social Services released County Fiscal Letter No. 17/18-38, which provided allocation funding for the Child Welfare Services – New System Project (New System). During the next several years, the state of California, counties, and Shasta County will be implementing a new online system for documenting all child welfare activities. The New System is built to allow child welfare workers to better ensure safety, well-being, and permanency of children at risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation. This will be replacing a 20-year old system currently in use with a new web-based agile system to enhance information security, child welfare productivity, and ease of use. The New System will include Child Welfare modules for Intake, Case Management, Court Processing, Eligibility, and Resource Family Approval functions. The deployment of each module of the New System will change current business processes and the day-to-day work of 178 staff in the Children’s Services Branch and more than 25,000 users across the state.
To assist with implementation and adoption of the New System, counties were provided funding for activities, which included project management, change management, data conversion, training, help desk support, and IT support. An additional Staff Services Analyst is needed to assist with the project management and implementation activities of a technical nature. HHSA received an allocation in Fiscal Year 2017-18 of $250,000 to support these activities.
This is a new mandate, and a Staff Services Analyst will have the skills necessary to assist in the ongoing implementation, future maintenance, and support of staff in the New System. New requirement activities to be completed include the following: initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the implementation of digital services modules; updating policies and procedures; documenting business processes and participating in the ongoing business processes for each digital service aspect; data conversion activities for implementation, incremental, and full load data conversion testing, and county staff participation in training to then train other county staff. After completion of the five-year implementation of the New System, this position will be responsible for ongoing training of new/existing staff in the New System, technical assistance, data cleanup, program evaluation, report running, and continual updates to the New System. |