Child Welfare Digital Services has selected Cambria Solutions and Accenture to work on the agency’s Case Management digital service — the largest of eight services under development to create the system that will replace the existing Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS) used by county case workers across California.
The Case Management digital service will provide state and county caseworkers, supervisors, staff and managers with a simple and efficient tool for maintaining a case record in a variety of situations, including family needs assessments, court-supervised or voluntary in-home services, foster care placement, family reunification services and permanency planning services.
The project is pioneering the development and operation of cloud-based software in the public sector, following a DevOps project life cycle rather than a traditional design, development and implementation (DDI)/maintenance and operations (M&O) model. The project is taking an innovative new approach for California state government, using agile methodologies, free/open source software and user-centered design.
The project’s first code release, in March, came six months before the selection and award of a system integrator and two to three years before any working software would have occurred under the previous monolithic “waterfall” approach.
Last week, CWDS announced the selection of CivicActions of Berkeley for development operations, a contract with a ceiling of $680,000, with extension options that could extend the limit to $4.8 million.
