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June 2017
Policy&Practice
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H
ow do we know what we know?
Much of our day-to-day work in
human services is guided by conven-
tional wisdom—the things we have
learned from experience and that we
know to be true. For example, one
local department of social services
was confident that adoptions took too
long because of the delays caused by
the courts. The facts, however, later
revealed that the local department
was the one holding up the process,
causing it to take more than three
years to finalize a termination of
parental rights because of paperwork
processing delays that were internal
to the department, not external. The
good news was that this meant they
had control over the problem. As a
result, they streamlined their business
process resulting in decreased lengths
of stay in foster care and increased
permanency rates. How did they do
this? They invested time and resources
to look for the root cause of the
problem in the data and challenged
their assumptions through a vigorous
diagnostic process utilizing a “Data
Fellows” framework.
When senior management at the
Fairfax County Department of Family
Services (DFS) learned of the Data
Fellows program and heard this story,
we knew what we had to do. This
program was the tool we needed to
change our culture to one of data-
informed decision-making at all levels.
The timing was perfect as the Fairfax
County Human Services System was
engaged in an ambitious IT integra-
tion project designed to break down
silos and allow all county human
services agencies to share data across
programs. The DFS wants to be ready
locally
speaking
Challenging Your Assumptions:
Using Data to Improve Client Success
By Ronald Chavarro and John Ruthinoski
See Locally Speaking on page 28
to take advantage of these powerful
data analytical tools that will enable
us to get to the root cause of our cus-
tomers’ problems.
Last year, DFS adopted Harvard’s
Leadership for a Networked World’s
Human Services Value Curve as the
basis for its strategic planning efforts
with the goal of becoming a truly
integrative agency by 2020. The DFS
recognizes that in order to achieve
this vision, we have to invest in our
staff and develop the internal capacity
needed to not only understand data,
but to also be able to ask the right ques-
tions in order to get to root causes.
The DFS combined a Data Analytics
Maturity Model with the Value Curve
(see diagram) to articulate the increas-
ingly complex data analytics capacity
needed by an organization in order
for it to move outward on the Value
Curve. For the DFS to progress to an
“integrative” or “generative” agency,
we needed to invest in our staff and
ensure they had the skills to test their
assumptions and learn what works best
for our clients.
The Data Fellows Program was
developed as a collaboration between
the New Jersey Department of
Children and Families staff and a
private vendor (Public Catalyst). The
program uses a “field and forum”
approach that integrates teaching,
exercises, and coaching to make sure
skills are mastered in a real-world
setting. Research has shown that
adult learners retain only about 10
percent of what they hear, about 65
percent of what they do, but nearly
100 percent of what they practice in a
Images courtesy of the Grand Rapids Center for Community Transformation
Data analytics maturity model adapted from FutureProof Enterprise Analytics.
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