The Alameda County Social Services Agency brought business values like efficiency and customer service to social services. Led by Don Edwards, the agency implemented the Social Services Integrated Reporting System (SSIRS) to give caseworkers a holistic view of clients across departments. This allowed for more proactive assistance and identified $11 million in annual fraud savings. SSIRS also improved coordination of services delivery and reduced customer wait times.

1. Smarter Planet
Leadership Series
Alameda County
Social Services
Agency
Brings Business Values
To Social Services
In his 10 years working at the North County Self Sufficiency Leadership
Center in Oakland, California, Don Edwards has never forgotten
why he took the job. He reminds himself every morning when
Spotlight
At the Alameda County Social
he goes to the lobby to survey the scene—the tapestry of Services Agency, Don Edwards is
citizens who have come here for help—and asks himself what leading an effort to bring business
practices—like efficiency, short
he can do to make their life better. As the Assistant Director lines and happy customers—
of Administration and Information Services for the Alameda to the realm of social services.
County Social Services Agency, the tools Edwards brings to
How Alameda County
bear are technology and an energetic desire to transform the Got Smarter
way the county serves its customers. Like most social service agencies,
Alameda has witnessed a series
of challenging trends, the most
On the shor t elevator ride to the agency’s four th floor prominent of which is the need to
administrative suite, Edwards is philosophical about what he do more with less. It’s doing so by
giving its caseworkers the tools to
sees. “Sometimes it looks fine,” he says. “Other times the line goes in one door be more proactive in helping their
and out the other.” Apart from such day-to-day patterns, Edwards has also clients get the assistance they
need. Leveraging IBM Cognos
taken note of a deeper trend, one that’s seen in the “new” faces that account business intelligence software,
for growing share of the agency’s limited resources. “In this economic climate, Alameda can get a seamless
“lifecycle” of view of its customers’
we’re seeing a change in the demographic profile of who we serve,” explains interaction with social service
Edwards. “More than ever, we’re seeing people coming from businesses that resources. Instead of a patchwork,
the agency’s departments can
have closed—people who not only look different from our traditional base, but coordinate their service delivery,
also have higher expectations for service.” while at the same time removing
the gaps between systems where
fraud can thrive. In fact, the
county’s new reporting system
has already saved $11 million
by cutting waste and fraud.
Let’s Build a Smarter Planet

2. Doing More With Less
This underscores the bitter reality that Alameda—and counties like it all across the United
States—are being asked to do more with less. Edwards has witnessed how this resource
crunch can have a corrosive effect on the agency caseworkers at the heart of the process.
“Every one of our people starts out idealistic and ready to help the world,” he says. “Then
reality slaps them in the face, with everyone coming in with an emergency and everyone
needing something right now.” With caseloads of greater than 500 customers not uncommon,
it doesn’t take long for the average caseworker to grow jaded and burnout to set in.
Edwards sees this as a human reaction. But his focus is on the other side of the desk, on the
people who take the bus in and can wait for hours for help, only to be told they need to come
back again with more information. Or those people whose benefits expire because they
didn’t reapply in time. To Edwards, the key to improving their experience in the “system”
may lie in emulating the practices of the banking industry, where he spent a decade earlier
in his career. “The solution we see is really about bringing business practices to social
services. You walk into a bank and no more than five minutes later you’re served, no matter
how long that line is,” Edwards explains. “While banks are also tight with their resources,
they’ve figured out efficiency, and that’s where we need to head.”
The Benefits of Alameda’s
Smarter Social Service
• $11 million in direct savings
through fraud and waste reduction
Toward Smarter Social Service Delivery • Gives managers and caseworkers
a deep, real-time understanding
Edwards recognized that to realize this vision, the agency needed to facilitate a more intelligent of case and program status,
enabling them to find the best
interaction with customers, with caseworkers able to spot needs or problems as—or even before assistance programs for
—they emerged. In the realm of social services, gleaning such insights requires a holistic view of each situation
the customer that takes into account not one facet of a customer’s life, but many—and from it • Reveals relationships between
benefit recipients and programs,
assembles a comprehensive profile of his needs and services. The fact that each of the agency’s helping to eliminate waste, fraud
five departments had its own separate system—disconnected from the whole—made this more and redundancy
seamless approach to social service delivery impracticable. Edwards’s goal was to put in place a • Generates reports in minutes
instead of weeks or months—
system that would change that. allowing caseworkers to apply
their expertise by trying “what if”
scenarios based on current data

3. The initiative Edwards had in mind epitomized his mission within the agency—to drive efficiency and
operational excellence through innovation. To gain the approval needed to proceed, he needed to
sell the concept on two levels. The first and most direct audience was his colleagues (also Assistant
Directors) who headed the agency’s four focal areas: Child Welfare, Welfare, Adults and Aging and
Welfare to Work and Administration, as well as the agency’s Director to whom they all reported. While
Edwards had established a solid track record, his fellow executives, leery of anything that distracted
them from the pressing priorities of day-to-day operations, were instinctively skeptical.
The value proposition he advanced was a drill-down reporting capability—the ability to view case
performance from the “global” agency level down to the worker, and all levels in between—that was
the stuff of managerial wish lists. But what turned the corner for Edwards was his decision to follow
to the dictum “show, don’t tell.” After working with IBM to develop a working proof of concept of the Leadership is:
Show, don’t tell.
solution, Edwards put it on the desktop of his colleagues to give them a taste of what it could do.
In selling the agency’s executives
“From that point,” he says, “the executives went from skeptical leaders to champions of the project.” on the merits of the proposed
solution, Don Edwards ended
up taking the most direct route
—deploying a working proof-
of-concept that lived up to the
maxim ‘seeing is believing.’
“From that point on, the
executives went from skeptical
leaders to champions
of the project.”
— Don Edwards, Assistant
Director of Administration
and Information Services,
the Alameda County Social
Services Agency
Securing funding for the project required the approval of the five-member Alameda County Board
of Supervisors as well as the county’s Administrator’s Office. As with his agency colleagues,
Edwards’s record of past successes served as a favorable backdrop for his pitch, which focused on
the efficiency, cost savings and improved level of service the proposed solution would enable. “Our
message resonated with the need for the agency—and the county as a whole—to overcome a host
of significant economic and social challenges,” says Edwards. “Our focus wasn’t on technology, but Lessons Learned:
ontools that let our employees work smarter and better handle their caseload.” Soft-pedal the
technology angle
“One of the keys to making this
After approval and a two-month implementation, Alameda had a working solution it calls the Social happen was a strong focus on
Services Integrated Reporting System (SSIRS). The key to SSIRS effectiveness is its ability to present the business side from the
beginning. To that end, we
a single, seamless view of its customers’ relationship with Alameda’s social services agencies over the brought the program people
course of their lives. It can show, for example, a child moving through foster care to his emancipation and the management together
and essentially gave them the
as an adult, where he or she may still receive food stamps and other welfare benefits. Once in reins. We took their feedback
adulthood, SSIRS can show how a family grows or changes over time, through deaths, births and as guidance on the design of
the solution.” (Edwards)
changes in marital status. Such tracking is a means to a greater end. Because agencies can see the
whole picture of a customer’s life across the entir span of services, they’re able to coordinate their
service delivery to best match customer needs and minimize service gaps or overlap.

4. The parameters of
Alameda’s smarter
social services
Instrumented
SSIRS extracts client
information from a series of
department specific systems.
Interconnected
SSIRS’s dashboard capability
enables agency staf f and
management to view case
performance from the “global”
agency level down to the worker,
and all levels in between.
Intelligent
Business intelligence and
automated alerts give caseworkers
the means to proactively manage
their client base, and for the
agency as a whole to coordinate
the delivery of social services.
Making “Proactive” Possible
Consider typical caseworkers—besieged, inundated and doing the best they can. Asking them to be
more proactive in managing their customers isn’t always a realistic proposition—because they simply
don’t have the tools. SSIRS changes this by introducing a layer of intelligence that helps uncover
needs and uses alerting capabilities to direct caseworkers to the most pressing priorities. To Edwards,
the impact of SSIRS on his customers’ lives is what counts the most. “If a single mom is alerted that
her food stamp annual review is past due or coming up, she can address it before she’s cut off, so she
doesn’t have to drag her two cranky children downtown on the bus, only to stand in line for hours,”
says Edwards. “If we can prevent that kind of thing on a large scale, we create a virtuous cycle by
enabling a better experience for both the customer and the caseworker.”
Waste is the perennial enemy of social services; fraud—namely people receiving benefits they’re not
entitled to—is one of its biggest sources. Its perpetrators thrive on the gaps between systems that
permit them to “game” the system without being detected: people who collect benefits from two
addresses or from stolen IDs, to name a few MOs. When Alameda brought SSIRS online, it acquired
almost overnight the means to pinpoint fraud that has long been difficult to detect and even harder
to prove. As Edwards explains, the cost and difficulty of pulling information together had compelled
Alameda to make painful choices. “In effect, we were forced to set a bar—a threshold—in terms of the
cost we’d be willing to bear to pursue these people,” says Edwards. “What SSISRS does is lower the
bar and put a stop to far more fraud than we could before. In the first year SSIRS came into use,
Alameda was able to reduce fraud by $11 million, which means there are more benefits available for
those who deserve them.”

5. Working Toward A Vision
On the heels of this success, Alameda is extending the capabilities of SSIRS and adapting key
processes to take full advantage of its functionality. For instance, investigators in the agency’s fraud
department are training on how to use the SSIRS system to improve their success rate. “SSIRS
complements our investigators’ skills by enabling them to connect dots that they could never connect
before.” The agency is also laying the groundwork for major changes in the case management
process that are designed to reduce the burden of routine tasks to free up more time for higher
value activities. One such initiative is the integration of IVR technology and SSIRS to enable it to
automatically notify a customer of the need to take action and—if appropriate—automated cut off
of benefits in the event of non-response.
From Edwards’s point of view, SSIRS is about transforming the way Alameda’s solution is…
social services are provided to make better use of taxpayer resources
Framework
and to more efficiently extend help to those who need it. “Because IBM Government Industry Framework
of SSIRS, we as an agency are better able to coordinate the way we
Software
deliver our services, while our case managers are now better able to
IBM Cognos®, IBM InfoSphere™
keep ahead o problems and spend more time proactively helping Identity Insight, IBM InfoSphere
Warehouse – Enterprise Edition
their clients,” explains Edwards. “That’s the vision of social services
we’re working toward.” Hardware
IBM InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse –
D5000
Services
IBM Global Business Services
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales
representative or IBM Business Partner.
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