Texas Department of Family and Protective Services: Web-Based Case Management Application

Accenture partnered with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to provide its nearly 7,000 employees with a robust Web-based case management application that helps them protect fellow Texans from abuse, neglect and exploitation. This child welfare application replaced an older client/server system and helped the agency operate at a higher level of performance through increased usability, enhanced collaboration with private partners and reduced remote access and maintenance costs.

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The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, with an annual budget of approximately $900 million, is charged with protecting Texas' unprotected—children, the elderly and people with disabilities—from abuse, neglect and exploitation. In pursuit of this charge, the agency's 7,000 employees regulate child care; investigate allegations of abuse and neglect against children, the elderly and people with disabilities; provide foster care, adoption assistance and a variety of services for victims and their families; and support contracted programs that make families safe and secure.

In 1996, Accenture partnered with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to develop a statewide, automated child and adult welfare system that provided comprehensive case management and administrative support for the agency's 6,400 staff members.

The Accenture application was a vast improvement over the numerous, disparate systems the agency used prior to 1996; however, its limitations were beginning to be felt by 2001. Through a competitive bidding process, Accenture was chosen to collaborate with the agency on a five-year business strategy to achieve the vision. Working together, the two pinpointed the need to transform the application into a high-performance Web-enabled platform for the future.

Accenture recommended implementing a J2EE platform to most effectively leverage the agency's existing assets. The Accenture team would have to recode the client-side logic, but in doing so, would achieve a vast amount of server-side code reuse. Such reuse would deliver great value to the client and the much-needed 40 percent savings to the project. Using our internal migration methodologies and leveraging our strong relationship with BEA, Accenture created the migration strategy to re-architect the department's existing application.

As of August 31, 2003, Accenture had delivered the first implementation of a fully enabled, browser-based statewide automated child welfare information system in the United States. Since then, the application has been used by all 7,000 employees in more than 249 offices, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Accenture's application, delivered on time and on budget, helped the agency not only meet a legislative mandate of doing more with less, but also improve how caseworkers in the field get their jobs done.

Thanks to the agility that Accenture built into the application, the agency can look forward to further innovation without needing to purchase additional hardware and software. Potential projects include opening the application to external partners to improve the quality of care, and to the public to enhance information sharing. Other possible enhancements include the ability to make online payment queries for providers, report incidents of abuse and neglect, and query child-welfare resources.

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