The AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) Tracking project touches on county, state, and federal organizations in their endeavor to achieve better social outcomes for Colorados families.
The Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) is the second largest State agency in the State of Colorado. CDHS operates on an annual budget of over $1.9B with an annual IT budget of over $60M. CDHS oversees the states 64 county departments of social/human services, the states public mental health system, Colorados system of services for people with developmental disabilities, the states juvenile corrections system, and all state and veterans nursing homes, through more than 5,000 employees and thousands of community-based service providers.
The CDHS Division of Child Welfare consists of a group of services intended to protect children from harm and to assist families in caring for and protecting their children. Taken together, these programs comprise the main thrust of Colorados effort to meet the needs of children who must be placed or are at risk of placement outside of their homes for reasons of protection or community safety. The delivery of Child Welfare Services in Colorado is a state-supervised, county administered system.  
The federal Administration for Children and Families (ACF) conducts Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs) as a Federal-State collaborative effort designed to help ensure that quality services are provided to children and families through State child welfare systems. The CFSR is one collaborative method to help States improve safety, permanency, and well-being outcomes for children and families. The first round of these reviews was completed in 2004. As part of these reviews, AFCARS data is used and incorporated into 15 complex measures on which states are rated against national standards. No state was found to be in substantial conformity across these 15 measures. Each state created a program improvement plan (PIP) to work toward meeting these measures in the second review.
In the AFCARS Tracking Project, the Governors Office of Information Technology/Colorado Department of Human Services (OIT/CDHS) and Infolink Consulting teamed to develop an easy-to-use tool  the AFCARS Business Intelligence (BI) Solution - that provides a way for Colorado to use data indicators to better meet federally mandated Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) compliance standards and program improvement plan (PIP) requirements. 
CDHS has used the AFCARS BI Solution for monitoring performance on the CFSR permanency composites and permanency measures at a State and County level, and to promote greater availability and understanding of data for current and prior time periods. The AFCARS BI Solution provides information that administrators, supervisors, and line staff can use to assess their performance quickly and easily.
The AFCARS BI Solution is divided into State performance on each permanency composite and permanency measure and County breakout by each permanency measure (safety measures to be available at a later date). Trend data allows a user to analyze State or County performance over a number of years on any particular permanency measure. Users can also drill down to explore cases and children that contribute to particular scores and possible changes in practice to improve services to families and help the State meet compliance standards.

ACF mandates that every State submit a data extract of specific data elements pertinent to monitoring adoption and foster care services to families every six months. This is AFCARS. This data is available to all states but is not in an information-ready status until ACF sends it back to the states following high-end analysis using a statistical package, or a data analyst does the same at the State level.
The AFCARS Tracking project capitalizes on the IBM Cognos business intelligence (BI) toolset. BI is part of a solution set IBM Cognos provides to enable decision makers across an organization to solve performance management problems and improve performance in the organization. BI helps answer an organizations questions  how am I doing? And why? BI offers score-carding and dash-boarding to answer the what is the current state of affairs question, and reporting and analysis to answer the why question. It is based on an enterprise class platform, i.e., a modern web services-based, services-oriented architecture. This provides easy access to any number of users throughout the organization. This BI toolset can sit on top of any data source, so the AFCARS BI Solution was designed to plug in to the AFCARS data extract file that CDHS sends to ACF. Whenever there is a new AFCARS data extract file available, it is a matter of minutes to point the AFCARS BI Solution to the new data file.
The IBM Cognos BI toolset offered a means for CDHS to use the Colorado AFCARS extract directly to gain the information necessary to compare CDHS performance against the ACF CFSR national standards. The complex logic of each CFSR measure is programmed into the AFCARS BI Solution to allow an apples-to-apples comparison with CFSR national standards and PIP goals. This provides this critical child welfare information within hours to Colorado state and county employees, versus waiting months for that information previously. Each data set is always available, allowing for trend analysis at the State and County level.

Yes

Yes

This AFCARS BI Solution is a specific example of a successful application of business intelligence to government. It provides:
	A foundation for data-driven decision making
	A single voice that delivers consistent information
	An easy-to-use tool that reduces time needed to produce critical information
	Insight into satisfying compliance reporting requirements

It use to take me about two months, in addition to and around other tasks, to process the AFCARS data using a statistical package, Excel, and Access, and deliver it in a meaningful format to managers and supervisors throughout the state. Now, I can deliver the same extract file to ACF and to our own staff on the same day and have that data transformed to information usable and accessible by staff throughout Colorado in a matter of hours. CDHS Data Analyst
With Colorado being a county-administered state, the County Departments of Social/Human Services workers are on the front line in delivering services to the citizens of Colorado. Feedback from various counties has indicated that with the new AFCARS BI solution, it has forged a closer working partnership between the State and Counties. There is better participation between the State and Counties, that the Counties do not feel as if they are out there on their own in providing needed services to the clients.  The Counties feel much more involved and in-tune with the CFSR process. 

Applying business intelligence technology to the world of human services is just starting to pick up over the last couple of years. As far as we can determine, this particular application is the first and only one of its kind. Others, typically more academic and research organizations, are using the AFCARS and other child welfare data to help states make data-driven decisions about their foster care programs, but this AFCARS BI Solution is unique in that it uses the exact logic of the CFSR measures using a dashboard and drill-through format rather than a statistical package. It is most effective for states to see at a glance how they are doing compared to the national standards and/or PIP goals to which they are held accountable.
This AFCARS Tracking project brought the benefits of information management in a very concrete, easy-to-use tool for use by the heads-down data analyst to senior management. The AFCARS BI Solution provides a sharable visual to the average user who does not understand data  it brings this whole process back to the children and child welfare cases in a timely manner that benefits Colorado families.

The biggest obstacle we had to overcome dealt with the lack expertise within our technical staff.  The IBM Cognos toolset was new to our IT organization.  The complexity of the 15 measures was huge.  We called upon Infolink Consulting for assistance.  They provided development assistance in building the AFCARS BI solution along with providing on-site mentoring for our technical staff in the use of the IBM Cognos toolset.  Inforlink also provided assistance in building-out the IBM Cognos environment as we prepared to implement the solution. Once the AFCARS BI solution was implemented, ongoing support and maintenance has been turned over to the internal IT staff. Additionally, the internal IT staff has begun development of other solutions utilizing Colorado Child Welfare data.

We took a very proactive approach in selling the project to the Executive Management of CDHS and to the County Offices of Human Services/Social Services.  One, research and analysis of the leading BI vendors was conducted which generated a business case for moving in the BI direction.  This was presented to the Executive Director of CDHS.  Along with the business case, proof of concepts were developed utilizing actual Colorado Child Welfare data for out of home services and the AFCARS data.  These also were presented to the Executive Director and her Executive Management Team.  By taking this approach, there was great enthusiasm on the part of the Executive Management Team to move forward with the project.  Additionally, the same presentations were given to a number of the Directors of larger County Offices of Human Services/Social Services.  Being able to see the information for their own counties was instrumental in getting their buy-in for the project.

Exceeded

This AFCARS BI Solution is easily adapted and usable by every state in the country. The AFCARS data extract file is formatted consistently across all states for ACF use. The AFCARS BI Solution can be used as is against another states data file (with minor tailoring for specific county names, etc.) or it can be tailored, expanded, and formatted to meet unique requests and wishes from other states. 

The bottom line is that every state is held accountable for its foster care and adoption services and evaluated against the same national standards. What we have seen is that it is very difficult to evaluate trends in your own performance in such a way that duplicates and matches how the federal government evaluates your performance, and in a timely manner that allows evaluation and possible redirection of policy and procedures to effect positive change. This tool has all the federal logic built in and ready for use for states to monitor and manage performance. Another state can adopt this tool at a fraction of the cost, since all of the programming and testing is complete, rather than trying to duplicate this effort on their own. 

Due the tremendous support at the executive levels for the project, the AFCARS BI solution was embraced by the target audience of users within weeks of the rollout.  The initial number of State and County was targeted at 250.  We are now in the process of enhancing our production environment so that it will accommodate the entire State and County user community of approximately 3,400. 
Several counties are also moving to the IBM Cognos toolset, so that they can merge State data with County data and provide internal management reporting to the County management.
Infolink Consulting, our development partner in this project, has received a number of inquiries about the AFCARS BI Solution from other states over the last few months since news of this solution spread. They have demonstrated it to four states already. We believe that states will want to adopt this solution as soon as financially feasible and depending on the adoption of the IBM Cognos BI toolset.