Governance, Management and Quality

Ali Shariat

Manager Planning, Architecture & Governance

Housing NSW, Department of Human Services

December 2010

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NSW Government Principal Departments

Education and Training

Premier and Cabinet

Treasury Human ServicesCommunities NSW

Transport and Infrastructure

Industry and Investment

Technology, Services and

Administration

Environment, Climate Change

and Water

Justice and Attorney General

Police and Emergency

Services

Planning

Health

Amalgamation of 165 Departments into 13 Super Department

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Department of Human Services

• Aboriginal Affairs• Aboriginal Housing• Ageing Disability & Home care• Community Services• Home Care Services• Housing NSW• Land & Housing Corporation• Juvenile Justice• Home Purchase Assistance Fund

From broad Community-building programs tosupporting the most vulnerable members of society,many with highly complex needs

FAMILIES

CHILDREN ANDYOUNG PEOPLE

MULTIPLE ANDCOMPLEX NEEDS

CLIENT PATHWAYS

WORKFORCE

SERVICE MODELS AND APPROACHES

EARLY INTERVENTION

ABORIGINAL PEOPLE

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Department of Human Services

– Statutory Child Protection– Out of Home Care – Adoptions– Disability services– Ageing (Healthy, Frail)– Seniors Card– Juvenile Justice

– Homecare

– Housing (Incl. Aboriginal Housing)

– Preschools and child care licensing

– Community capacity and social capital

– Family support

– Disaster welfare relief

• DHS employs approximately 18,500 staff

• Operating budget over $6 billion

• 480 locations across NSW

• $28B in Housing assets

• 800,000 clients

• Third to fifth largest NSW Department

• Services rages from:

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Information is critical to any business….

“When things fell down there was a big lack of information, (resources) weren’t used because

agencies weren’t sharing information. Information…did not reflect reality on the

ground.”

Ken Moroney said the failure

to solve the F3 traffic jam had

been caused by misinformation

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The Information Management Agenda

• Government agenda and reform is information hungry• Better Services and Value Taskforce• Corporate and Shared Services Blueprint

• Significant change program at DHS and across government• Keep Them Safe• No Wrong Doors• Stronger Together• Brighter Futures…

• Information is one of our primary corporate assets

• Evidence based practice is highly valued (and expected)

• New and compelling opportunities need to be exploited (DHS)

• GIPA – making information available

• Gov 2.0 opportunities

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Lets Look at Two Case Studies Within Human Services

Community Services

Housing NSW

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Let’s Rewind 12 years…

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Case Study - NSW Community Services

• Statutory child protection agency in NSW• 1998 Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection found that:

• “DoCS had no mechanism to retrieve, integrate information from its data sources and little capacity to use information to manage its business.”

• Incomplete, inaccurate or just plain missing information can have devastating consequences for Community Services operations

• Mistakes not easily forgiven

By 2009:• Child protection reports: 310,000

• Children involved: 135,000

• Rate of reporting: 83.5 per 1000 children

• Children in care: 16,500

Graph 72,047

121,368140,184

286,033

241,003

216,386

185,198176,271

159,643

107,394

72,986

201,208

49,073

103,074

115,000

160,842

0

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

300,000

350,000

1999/00 2000/01 2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07

Total reports

Reports referred to CSC/JIRT forfurther assessment

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Solution

• Develop an information system to support the business (Woods)

• Chief Executive to drive the information agenda

“Managing Community Services without information is like flying a plane without coordinates”

• Funding received for Corporate Information Warehouse (CIW)

• Scope:

Management, corporate and legislated reporting and

Information for analysis

• CIW went live 2005 with Data quality as a big issue.

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Information Quality

• Information Quality Framework

• Prioritise data to remediate

• Executive responsible for data quality

• CIW identified data exceptions • Every case worker got involved • State wide data remediation team (27 officers)

Graph

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Diagnosis

• Fixing data after the event was never ending, and expensive• Root cause analysis of the reason for poor data quality revealed

multiple reasons: • Culture and attitude• Skills• Expectations• Processes • Systems

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Prevention is better than Cure

Thus begins a holistic solution to data quality:

• Professional standards for casework now includes timely and accurate data entry

• Training on the importance of information quality included in Manager induction

• IT systems designed around agreed business processes and information requirements

• Validation of data at point of entry rather than after-the-fact

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What IM looks like now

• CIW now provides enterprise wide reporting and a single source of trusted information for CS

• Source of all legislated, management and KPI reporting

• Data extracts for high end analysis and research

• Robust information management, research and analysis functions

• Good linkages between information, research, policy and practice

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Lessons Learnt

• Executive sponsorship

• Good governance is the key

• Prioritise your information assets

• Clear roles

• Align closely with business needs

• Make data quality a corporate goal (#2 in Community Services)

• Move with the times and be prepared…

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Be prepared…

• Several tragic deaths of vulnerable children in 2007• New Special Commission of Inquiry established in 2008• This time: CIW was the single source of Community Services data • 250 data reports across all lines of business• Statistical reports provided were:

• Often complex• Integrated multiple data sources (eg HR and client data to produce

workload reports)• Historical trends and projections• Close to real time data (CIW refreshed daily)

• CIW is now being used to support the implementation of the Keep Them Safe program since March 2009

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Housing NSW

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• One of the largest providers of social housing in the world

• Manages over 146,000 properties and over 140,000 tenancies

• Value of assets approx. $28 billion

• Employs 2,500+ people

• Almost 70,000 Housing Register applications received each year

• Housing NSW offers other services such as rental assistance, home purchase assistance, community housing

• Under the stimulus Plan, Housing NSW to build 6000 properties

• Federal Govt allocated $130 million to reduce backlog of maintenance & upgrade 31,000 homes. NSW Govt supplemented this by bringing forward $200m & HNSW will contribute $140m from our existing budget.

Housing NSW

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Let’s Rewind 4 years…

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Housing Business System Strategy

Integrated Housing System - IHS– Core application that manages all NSW Housing clients, and property

assets– Used by 95% of the organisation (use, contribute to, rely on)– Used to serve clients, manage operations and reporting – Implemented in 1998

A new Project initiated in 2006 to replace IHS– Packaged solution instead of heavily customised solution or in-house

development– Functionality based on business requirements– New user interface, Workflow functionality, Portal, Improved Data

Quality– System has been named – HOMES– Delivery Timeframe – Nov 2010

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Housing BI Strategy (Developed around similar time)

Problem

– Fragmented data sources and inconsistency in reports

– IHS reporting did not allow for trend analysis

– Data quality issues in IHS

– Extracted data had morphed into a satellite system for reporting

Solution

– Establish BI Competency Centre & Governance to manage & administer BI

– Adopting a ‘whole of organisation’ or enterprise view of information

– Managing information as a critical asset

– Providing information that is both accessible and understandable to those who need it

– Provision of tools (Data Warehouse & reporting) to enable information to be effectively analysed and interrogated in support of decision making

– Ability to report on multiple data sources such as Finance and HR– All Reporting for HOMES to be produced through the new Enterprise Data Warehouse

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What is the current state of these initiatives

20082009

2010 ??

• People started to question the value of the investment

• All we have to show part filled shelves from old system

• The grand idea has turned into what is the minimum we can do to suffice the reporting requirement for HOMES.

• Should we continue to manage this or outsource?• Should we adopt a new strategy

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What had gone wrong?

• Governance:– The Chief Executive is not the Sponsor– One of the Executive Directors was the sponsor, however since

2007, there has been 5 different sponsors due to restructure– The steering committee was only represented by the project and

technical

• HOMES over shadowed this project

• 75% of project team has been replaced

• The only reason the project is in existence is the need for HOMES reports

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Model for Corporate Governance of IT

Corporate Governance

of IT

Direct Monitor

Evaluate

BusinessNeeds

BusinessPressures

Per

form

ance

Con

form

ance

Pro

posa

ls

Pla

nsP

olic

ies

Business Processes

ICT OperationsICT Projects

AS/NZS ISO/IEC 3500:2010

26 Working Together to Keep Them Safe