July-August-20179GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKwork allocation studies have shown that child services caseworkers spend 35-45 percent of their time on administrative duties and less than 25 percent on client-facing activities. Technology can help flip those numbers.8 Tips for Advancing a Data-Driven Culture in Child Services1. Get Leadership Buy-in: Have a strong, stated commitment to data-driven decision making as a core value that has consistent buy-in, involvement and investment from leadership.2. Look beyond Compliance: One of the biggest challenges is making data relevant and valued in the field, not just seen as a hammer, It's about engaging front-line workers and making a clear connection to outcomes.3. Integrate Data for Big-Picture Perspective: For example, getting a clear picture of a child's risk would typically require data from six to 10 government agencies. Case agents don't have to pick up the phone and call all these agencies. A child abuse prevention analytics system streamlines the process by retrieving relevant data from those various sources--departments of health, education and corrections, for example--and importing it into one database.4. Without that shared data, we focus on small process measures in our day-to-day work, such as how many visits were made, and we have a hard time getting a true picture of child and family outcomes.5. Be very Strategic about What You Track: Don't just generate more reports and indicators. Use data as the opportunity to prioritize what's most important and where we expect to get the largest benefit from the efforts we make.6. Score Some Early Wins: It's hard to sell an idea, but everybody wants to buy into a proven success. Social workers, who are dealing with high-stress situations every day, need to be able to see how this really impacts the work they're doing out there.7. Think Continuously Improving Process: Ideally, data plays into the many stages of the process--in allocating resources, tracking the delivery of services and assessing outcomes--all of which yields new insights that are fed back into the first step for even better decisions the next time around.8. Keep it Simple: You don't have to become a statistician. Some of the biggest success stories seen have been social workers who realized how useful the data was to them in working with children and families, but they couldn't tell you a thing about how the data got computed or calculated.9. Own it: Don't let child abuse prevention analytics be somebody else's business. If the data is going to be useful, it's going to be a part of the [internal] culture. It's not something you outsource
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