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NY State Human Services Agencies Implement Cognos Solution

In upstate New York, 58 counties are directly administering human services programs, with their staff providing services directly to clients and tracking that service delivery on statewide computer programs. To meet the challenge of this critical service delivery in a time of tight budgets, hiring freezes and shrinking staff rolls due to retirements, the New York State Human Services agencies are working at technology solutions that can modernize their aged legacy welfare systems to better meet the unique information and reporting needs of county welfare agency staff. New York State turned to partners IBM, Microsoft and Cognos, a world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, to provide county users with the capabilities to develop views of welfare operations that are both sharable and customizable across the state.

NYS Department of Family Assistance (DFA) is currently integrating Cognos Series 7 into the SOS system, a voluntary solution that leverages the report building capabilities of staff in more technically competent counties, and transfers those reporting solutions to less technically competent counties. Cognos enables caseworkers to instantly access custom reports and data cubes via a Web browser, giving them the ability to perform trend analysis across cases, clients, and program areas. Questions like "What is the cost per case for caseworkers in the Medicaid intake unit?" or "What zip codes have the lowest client enrollment in 3rd party health insurance?" can now be easily answered with the Web-based solution.

"Local county caseworkers are often dealing with confidential, mission-critical data about the children and families receiving human services in New York State. With Cognos, we have enabled caseworkers to view this case data instantaneously in customizable and standardized formats via a Web browser on the state or county networked PC, enabling them to deliver targeted services to the right clients more effectively and timely, while reducing a lot of tedious tasks along the way," said Martha Hoffman, IT Customer Relations Project Manager in the New York State Office for Technology.

Using Cognos also enables the counties to better monitor their compliance and success with federal welfare reform. NYS DFA has also developed a centralized Welfare Reform Tracking System (WRTS) that identifies clients who have been receiving welfare for an amount of time that exceeds the federal limit of five years. "We are able to pinpoint these individuals and intervene at an earlier stage, perhaps offering additional assistance such as subsidized daycare, to help this individual get back on their feet. They no longer get lost in the system and risk facing penalties," added Hoffman.

"State and local governments face a number of challenges -- shrinking headcount, tightening budgets, and increasing caseloads. Cognos allows DFS departments to better leverage existing investments to provide an end-to-end view of case management processes and timely information to employees on the front lines," said Terence Atkinson, director of public sector solutions, Cognos. "By enabling caseworkers to securely access and analyze data to identify trends across geographical and program areas, DFS is improving service delivery for hundreds of thousands of recipients in New York state."