CA Department of Aging

CDA (California Department of Aging)

The California Department of Aging (CDA) administers programs that serve older adults, adults with disabilities, family caregivers, and residents in long-term care facilities throughout the State. These services are provided locally by contracted Area Agencies on Aging (AAA) and Independent Living Centers (ILC). CDA’s CHARM Project will provide an integrated technical CRM platform to promote more timely and higher quality data to drive efficient, effective, and equitable planning, delivery, and continuous improvement of person centered services for older adults and people with disabilities in the state of California. The modernization of CDA’s data system will improve and enhance the department’s data, business intelligence and relationship management across all CDA programs.

Business Challenge

CDA has 33 partner AAAs who are using disparate CRM systems whose data is not shared among the participating CDA partners, while sharing the data with CDA itself is a prolonged manual process that takes weeks to complete. ECI conducted a survey across all AAAs in CA and discovered that nine different CRM platforms were used among them. One can imagine the challenges with nine CRM platforms for older adults and people with disability as they try to navigate through various systems to obtain services, often creating multiple profiles because data is not shared between AAAs. CDA’s plan was to integrate all 33 AAAs under a single umbrella, a centralized CRM platform where data will be shared seamlessly shared across.

 

ECI PAL S2AA

ECI focused on alternative solutions and analyzing those against CDA’s current IT environment from the technical and financial perspectives. As a result of this effort CDA has a clear vision of what is the most viable alternative solution to replace their current CRM platforms with a centralized CRM system utilized and shared by all Area Partner Agencies.

ECI’s consultants main responsibility was to provide leadership, guidance, and knowledge transfer to CDA on all technical issues related to planning and implementation of a centralized CRM platform as part of the PAL S2AA process which included:

 

– Business and Technical Complexity Assessment

– Documenting SPI’s As-Is environment

– Identifying pain points and challenges with current SPI system

– Documenting To-Be Business Process

– Documenting Mid-Level Solutions Requirements

– Documenting As-Is & To-Be Technical Environment and Specifications

– Market Research for Alternative Solutions (COTS, MOTS, Custom Built)

– S2AA Technical Assessment of Vendor Solutions

– Recommended Solution

– Created a Data Migration Strategy for 33 AAAs

– Advised CDA on Change Management strategy and potential risks of resistance by some Area Partner Agencies.

– Advised CDA on using the CHARM project as a stepping-stone to create an enterprise architecture strategy and data management framework.