Massachusetts Social Services and Information Technology Case Study

Massachusetts Social Services and Information Technology - Case Study Example In addition to his, the state legislature would pass a bond for Information Technology, which the agency targeted. In order to receive it, the agency must submit a justification request for the fund, which included an examination of both the two failed projects. The first failed project had a $20 million budget while the second one, still under development, had a $32 million budget. The state legislature approved the funding, giving the agency an obligation of ensuring this project succeeded. In order to do this, they analyzed the agency’s services, organizational culture and the current challenges that developers may face (Garson, 2006). One such project is the Information systems’ project at the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which is an agency branch for Health and Human Services. This department deals with complex, unstructured and a large amount of information including tracking recipients of services, welfare benefits applications, scanning fingerpri nts and electronic benefits card issuing. In addition to this, Policies in the federal governments constantly change, at least four times in a year thus affecting any rule that already exists. The agency provides aid to families in different ways including childcare, food stamps, and families with dependent children, emergency aid to children, disabled and the elderly, emergency assistance, supplemental security income, and employment services program. Because of the variety of these services, social workers, as well as clients move from one place to another, meeting different people in order to receive services. The processes are complicated and tiresome. In addition to these, social workers must ensure that benefiters are genuine and deserving of the services by racking their backgrounds and history of benefits. The organizational realized that an effective ay of dealing with these problems would be adopting an Information system, which would facilitate speed and make duties of th e social workers easy. The system would store client information and make tracking them easy. All information systems projects require feasibility studies that examine the possibility of their successes. Failure to carry out these studies or poorly carried out feasibility studies leads to failures of projects. Poor feasibility studies lead to poor planning, documentation, staffing, budgeting, and scheduling. In addition to these, other issues such as organizational and cultural issues, as well as under estimation of scope and complexities are contributing factors to the failure. The planning and management team in the initial project failed to plan for the system. The system developers designed and documented it poorly. In addition to this, system was written in COBOL, which is difficult to understand and document. To ensure success of this project, the agency’s management The state governor appoints a commissioner who heads the agency’s department. At the initial stag es of the project, the commissioner was an employee from the career department from Field and Eligibility operations. A deputy commissioner was also appointed, from the Field and Eligibility Operations. The department has positions for administration and finance, procedure and program management and MIS, policy, who are all appointed from the Field an