Technology and Data as Core to Delivering Services — What the Pandemic Taught Us

Sometimes it takes the world flipping on its head to come together and understand how technology solutions in government are now essential to better delivering services to the public. The work my team has been doing with the State of Connecticut’s Office of Early Childhood (OEC) is a prime example of this, but it didn’t exactly start that way.

A year ago, Team Skylight, a technology-focused team committed to helping agencies deliver public services, was brought on by OEC to help them upgrade their use of data and technology to advance their mission. The heart of the agency’s work is in overseeing a network of programs and services such as early care and education, early intervention and home visiting that help young children and their families thrive.

As part of this larger effort to upgrade and modernize information technology (IT) in the agency, there were several different projects underway ranging from overhauling the website to improving data collection systems. While OEC clearly saw and understood the need for this type of work, it wasn’t a focus, especially amidst the day to day programmatic priorities of the agency. As is the case with many organizations, IT was seen as separate until the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to reconsider this relationship.

Before then, we were seeking to address a need for the state to know more about children receiving state funded child care support. This type of data is critical for OEC to understand, evaluate, and communicate their impact. There were some challenges with existing data systems in place including: accuracy of the data, different reporting requirements from different funding sources, and basic usability challenges for child care providers in reporting back to the agency about their programs. In response to what we learned initially, we designed and launched a pilot for a new data collection tool to be used by childcare providers to deliver their data. We were plugging away in our corner, getting positive feedback on the pilot, and planning to roll out to other programs. And then the pandemic hit.

The child care space in Connecticut and across the country was greatly impacted by what was happening. Essential and frontline workers with young children who needed to show up in person required child care support, while child care centers were also shutting down because of the pandemic. OEC staff was forced to shift to a remote work environment and its associated technology, which was new for most. The agency had to add supporting urgent and emergency state needs to their existing priorities.

“As a team, designing and delivering digital services is difficult in the best of times. The pandemic challenges us to focus on long-term goals while being empathetic to the tremendous uncertainty childcare providers face in Connecticut.”

— Ryan Hansz, Designer and Product Manager

The roll out of our pilot screeched to a halt. It wasn’t a time where we could or should reach out to more child care providers to test this new tool. But the pause on this work offered a surprising opportunity. Seeing how the agency was collecting data in emergency-mode helped us tease out core needs such as a flexible, easy to use, and secure means of doing ad-hoc data collection from child care providers. More importantly, in the urgency to assess and report what is happening right now, more staff at the agency are starting to realize that what they do every day is critically linked to what we have been working on. Rachel Leventhal-Weiner is the Chief Research and Planning Officer for the agency, and has been overseeing our work and OEC’s internal IT efforts. Among many other efforts, she has been working to reframe how folks internally think about technology. Together, we are striving to take advantage of this moment to focus on the interconnectedness of data and the agency’s core work.

As a result of all of this, we’ve been able to have a lot of strategic internal conversations about short and long term needs and priorities that hadn’t happened before. We now have a clear short term goal — data collection. Our long term goal remains to partner with the agency to put in place the pieces for an integrated data system. Now, more of OEC, including senior leadership, is engaged in helping us make key decisions quickly to move things forward.

As an outside civic technology team, we’ve also been reflecting on how we can work with partners like OEC to better align, and more effectively communicate the importance of digital transformation work. A few working ideas that our team will try and test moving forward include:

• Starting work with a shared set of guiding goals that energize and incentivize all the necessary collaborators and stakeholders.
• Identifying a reachable wish list of what’s possible in the beginning within the scope of work that makes the work feel valuable every step of the way.
• Establishing a shared definition of what “done” means and a clear plan to get there.
• Creating a mix of deliverables that offer both immediate (e.g. using third party tools to improve how the agency collects and tracks provider contact information) and longer term, big picture value to the agency (e.g. — the groundwork for an integrated data solution). That way we are demonstrating value soon and throughout.
• Finding ways to communicate in the right cadence with key stakeholders within and outside of state government, but especially on the inside. This also includes communications that value quality over frequency, and that convey the work that is being done and why it’s important in accessible ways (read: plain language). This helps everyone.

We still have a lot of ground to cover as our work continues. But getting more people to understand and integrate the value of data and technology work, and seeing it as inseparable from their own work to serve people and communities is a critical first step.

Julia Hogan is a technologist at Skylight Digital who works with city and state agencies to improve outcomes and operations through better digital services.

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