Texas Health and Human Services Commission supports multichannel business model with SOA solution

Social services organizations are looking to evolve as technology has made it possible to service clients in a variety of ways, including Web self-service, call centers and mail, in addition to the traditional face-to-face channel.

Until recently, the face-to-face option was the only channel supported by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC). The HHSC oversees the operations of the state’s health and human services system, providing administrative oversight of some health and human services programs and directly administering others. HHSC is responsible for approximately 8 million clients, 40,000 employees and an annual budget of $54 billion.

The agency wanted to improve the service it provided to clients, increase the variety of ways in which clients could contact the agency, support more programs, increase operational efficiencies and enhance accountability all while reducing costs.

The previous IT infrastructure was inherently decentralized and lacked coordination, making it extremely difficult for the state’s 12,000 case workers to act in concert. Individual offices across the state operated independently, and they did so at great expense. The state was spending $350 million a year to support those 12,000 case workers.

A proliferation of technology platforms with a cost of ownership that was rising relentlessly every year impeded the flexibility of HHSC’s overall IT base, with the result that the system could not adequately meet the needs of its business users. In turn, the organization itself was not agile enough to satisfy its many stakeholders, including clients, employees and other agencies.

Stepping into the future

The commission decided that it needed to implement a new business model to offer its clients better and more varied service over the phone, at hospitals, in community centers, at HHSC’s offices and via the Internet. It would need a new technology model to support this multichannel approach.

"We wanted to rationalize the $350 million expense of supporting 12,000 case workers," says Mohammed Farooq, CTO of HHSC. "We also wanted to enable business process outsourcing (BPO) to ensure that the addition of new client channels would not be burdensome. In the long run, we did not want HHSC to look after all client interactions; we wanted, for example, the state’s call centers to have the flexibility to be outsourced to private vendors."

Designing a roadmap

Tasked to extend existing IT assets, Farooq decided to introduce a new paradigm to change the way the organization used technology. One of the first implementers of Web services with XML during his previous employment at Commerce One, Farooq decided to put this expertise to work in designing a distributed, standards-based computing platform and implement a service oriented architecture (SOA) to achieve HHSC’s goals.

HHSC established a long-term plan mapping out steps and milestones for the next five years. The plan had four primary elements:

Moving to a shared IT platform
Enabling the provision of business capabilities across programs
Adopting a development methodology focused on satisfying business requirements
Employing an explicit project management framework

The IT team working with Farooq established maturity levels for each aspect of the plan so that it could assess not only its progress each step of the way but also the business benefits and relative costs. The final aspect of the roadmap was the establishment of a Project Management Office (PMO), which was charged with accommodating all enterprise-class business transformation projects.

Gaining acceptance

Obtaining executive buy-in on the approach was the next step, followed by building the business case for the plan. Farooq stresses that the primary factors in gaining acceptance were the facts that IT assets would be re-used, thus lowering costs, and that the IT team committed to delivering predefined capabilities at predetermined costs, at regular intervals. “Because we were going to re-use existing assets, we would be able to deliver new capabilities more quickly and at a lower cost than if we built everything from scratch,” he says.

Implementing IBM technology

Many of the HHSC’s workflows were already automated, but because they had been hard-coded, they provided little flexibility. SOA services orchestration requires the abstraction of business rules from the process layer in order to enhance development flexibility. Weighing the costs of migrating existing applications to a new platform versus adding technologies on top of the existing platform, the commission chose the latter. "We determined that the most cost-effective approach would be to incrementally add new SOA infrastructure layers to what we already had," says Farooq.

In the case of the workflow engine, the team standardized on J2EE as the application platform and added IBM WebSphere® Process Server to run on top of the existing IBM WebSphere Application Server. "In this way, we did not have to change the transaction platform but still obtained flexibility at the top level," Farooq comments.

Focusing on people

With this technology came an even greater emphasis on business process management (BPM). "Once people started really looking at the organization and its workforce through ‘SOA glasses,’ they could see things in a completely different light," says Farooq. "We placed more emphasis on organizational redesign and workplace transformation than we did on technology."

Leveraging a $350 million investment

After a six-month pilot period, the new system had full management support, and universal acceptance was not far behind. "The fact that we were able to take our $350 million legacy investment in IT and convert it to support the new business model went a long way toward our achieving acceptance," says Farooq.

The development of shared services presented an added advantage, providing the same capability with increased capacity and scope, within six months.

"In addition, the new methodology enabled us to see and report on the specific business capabilities that had been enabled at any given point, rather than simply whether a particular release had been completed," says Farooq. "The key change was that project management was no longer totally focused on delivering projects; it was strategically aligned to the goals of the HHSC. This involved distinct realignments that went from the local level to the medium and middle levels of management all the way through to executive management."

Four years after the beginning of its transformation efforts, 60 - 70 percent of the project is complete. HHSC provides multichannel support for its customers. In addition, HHSC now has an accepted SOA model and is moving forward. "Right now our attention is on performance management both IT and business," says Farooq. "Performance management matters if you are going to execute business and IT change."

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:
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For more information on the State of Texas Health and Human Services Commission, visit:
www.hhsc.state.tx.us