How do you know if your program is doing what it’s meant to do? The obvious answer is to develop metrics and a means for tracking that data to see that outcomes meet or exceed expectations. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the data you need but do have access [...]
Like death and taxes, change is inevitable. I worked in state government for 23 years and every election cycle brought change. The extent of the change varied in degrees. One Republican (or Democrat) replacing another Republican (or Democrat) as governor usually meant minor organizational adjustments to come (a tweaked organizational chart with new names and [...]
For our 25th anniversary, my wife and I took our family to Paris and Rome to explore, see the sights, and create an adventure full of all “bucket list” activities. Traveling to these wonders and seeing everything the grand cities have to offer, I found myself awed and aghast at what I can only call [...]
I hate buying things. To be more exact, as a state administrator, I hated buying services. My problem wasn’t with the complexities of the state procurement process – I was a bureaucrat after all and figuring out how to do paperwork was half the fun of the job – but I found determining what to [...]
92 counties. 92 different ways to do the same thing. In 1995, I discovered a truth: figuring out how people do their jobs is complicated. The complication comes not from what they do, but from the different approaches each person takes to get the job done. In 1995, I was a young, naïve consultant in [...]
My day job is helping state welfare agencies navigate the fens and bogs of federal law and regulation. My side job is helping netlogx team members understand how state government works the unique struggles our state clients face. Many new netlogx team members have worked in the private sector and have had little interaction with [...]
In honor of National Thesaurus Day today, I’d like to talk about ‘feckless’ and ‘fecklessness’ and how not to be labeled as either while providing services to clients. ‘Feckless’ and ‘fecklessness’ stem from and are antonyms to ‘effect’ and ‘effectiveness’ and have a range of flavors from aimless and shiftless to inept and ineffectual. A [...]
For ten plus years, I was the state of Indiana’s TANF Program manager. As a state administrator, I’d inevitably spend time listening to advice from a private sector consultant who had been an administrator in another state. The conversation would be cordial until the consultant would wax poetic about how his old state did something, [...]
During the May 22 – 25 APSHA National Health and Human Services 2016 Summit, I was struck by the use of the word “welfare” and in particular by whom. Over the past 20+ years “welfare” has been supplanted by the more politically correct terms of “human services” or “social services”. I have to admit that [...]
On June 24, 2014, the National Review Online posted an article entitled ‘Welfare Abuse Almost Quelled’. (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381063/welfare-abuse-almost-quelled-jillian-kay-melchior) An intriguing title about a simple – and relatively inexpensive – solution Indiana implemented to address concerns that the State’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Family (TANF) cash assistance recipients were accessing and using their benefits in specific restricted [...]
