EVALUACIÓN GLOBAL

The specialization, however, required more than just gathering and organizing caseworkers into specialized units to deploy the tasks that mattered. For one,

21 _{The Family Court of Clark County, with courtrooms in the east side of the city, presides over family-}

related cases involving ‘divorce, annulment, child custody, visitation rights, child support, spousal support, community property division, name changes, adoption, and abuse and neglect’. Since the installation of the two courtrooms in DAFS’ location, the Courts began hearing all DAFS’ child support cases on site. See http://www.clarkcountycourts.us/departments/judicial/family-division/.

98 employees in each unit must have access to the relevant cases to be worked – for the Establishment Unit, these are cases that do not have on record the legal paternities of children born out of wedlock or child support orders reflecting the noncustodial parents’ monthly obligation amount. Despite having a federally certified state-run case management system, the official database containing all case information for audit purposes, it was not set up to support DAFS’ business model efficiently and effectively. The Nevada Operations of Multi-Automated Data Systems (or

NOMADS), according to Andy, was ‘designed to do this ‘cradle to grave’ type of a process [the business model of smaller offices] and does not support multiple layers of supervision…’ (Andy, InterviewManagement). Moreover, its design was not

…user friendly at all… there’s over 400 screens that a case manager needs to know and understand in order to do case management for child support. The problem is that not only do you need to know those 400 screens, you need to know how to navigate through them, and you need to know all the codes that are associated with the values that go into the fields on those screens, and, uh…. The work effort to train somebody off the street to use NOMADS is between a 6 to 12-month training period. Now a good computerized system, somebody should be able to learn that within 2-3 weeks. (Andy,

InterviewManagement)

To address this challenge and support the new measurement regime, DAFS IT programmers intervened and built pipelines to connect caseworkers to their cases so the relevant tasks could be deployed. Their intervention was critical because,

according to Deb, ‘part of our problem was that our computer system was not set up to work with the federal performance measures. So, we didn’t have any way of pulling information and the number of cases we should work’ (Deb, FG2Supervisors). The IT Team, therefore, extracted the relevant case information from NOMADS and

developed an ancillary system to transmit the relevant information to caseworkers according to their assigned units. As data links were established, data reporting was made possible. The system’s technical affordances (Pollock & D'Adderio, 2012) enabled the production of ‘super reports’ to help caseworkers get a sense of the status of their cases and act accordingly. The ‘super establishment report’, according to Nancy, was ‘laid out to a T where you just took one look at it, you knew what you

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were gonna do’. As for the ‘super enforcement report, … each case manager could pull up their cases that had not paid’ (Donna, FG2Supervisors) so they know which cases to target. Without these devices in place, caseworkers would have had to contend with an ailing system that was not configured to deliver their ‘good’. As an IT expert claimed, ‘it’s just an extra thing we have to do’ so that caseworkers can ‘do their job, basically’ (Andrea, InterviewIT).

These reports were further supported by DAFS’ paperless system. For years, prior to the relocation, case files were stored at the ground floor of the building with no system in place to track the movement of cases. As one of the caseworker said, ‘we had no idea what other cases were out there. They were never being touched for years and years’ (Katrina, FG3Caseworker). If they needed to work on a case, caseworkers would either place a request for the actual paper case file to be sent to them, which took two to three days, or personally collect the files from the records room. Without a monitoring system, caseworkers and attorneys could spend days just trying to locate a case file. This was how Andy explained the process back then.

…people would send down sticky notes and it would say what the case number is, the case name, and who’s requesting that. And so somebody down there would pull that and run it upstairs and get it or case managers would run downstairs and pull these cases off the shelf themselves. It was messy, it was inefficient, and there was no way to track a specific case. Daily emails would go out saying: ‘I’m looking for this case. Do you happen to have it on your desk?’ And occasionally you’d come back and two weeks later and say: ‘I found it, thank you’. By that time, the court had come and gone. (Andy, InterviewManagement)

The document imaging of paper files facilitated the movement of cases between and across units and DAFS’ partner agency (i.e. Clerk’s Office). It greatly reduced the time spent accessing cases and minimized the risk of losing or misplacing case files. Having immediate access to their cases meant that they could act on them quickly and produce the ‘good’ that mattered. As one of the supervisors said, ‘… when we did it through regular paper, it would take us about a week to get that paperwork back. Now it’s only done in a matter of minutes’ (Erwin, InterviewSrStaff).

100 With a document management system in place, caseworkers were able to pull up

documents for review easily without having to walk up to a filing cabinet or records room to access a physical case file. As Erwin said, they just had to ‘type in the number, the case number and it’s right there. All those documents are there’. This allowed them to gather and process their paperwork quickly so they could pass it on to the relevant department for further processing (e.g. Investigations department to serve a noncustodial parent or Clerk’s Office to sign the paperwork).

The shift to a paperless system, however, meant a shift in practice. This, for some attorneys, was sometimes difficult. Eleanor, for example, found the system more cumbersome particularly when having to review the history of a case, but admitted that ‘it takes some getting used to’. She explained how the system was restricting the way she should review cases, requiring her to go through the ‘clicks’ – a technical constraint (Pollock & D'Adderio, 2012) shaping the way she had to approach her work – rather than simply flipping through the pages of a physical case file. ‘I can go through a file like this (flips through one of the remaining paper case file folders). What did that take me, 2 seconds? Going through it on there, I gotta click and then I gotta wait. Oh, wait, that’s not the document I need. I gotta click and I gotta wait…’ Because her practice was not aligned with the system’s operating model, it was difficult for her to make the adjustments required – an adjustment that meant not having to review the entire case history prior to a court hearing, an adjustment that meant selecting and prioritizing. As she explained, ‘we have to prioritize. Is it important to go back 3 court hearings or 2 court hearings? Probably not. On every case, probably not. But are we missing some stuff? I know we are’.

For Suzanne, another attorney, being dependent on technology presented problems during the system’s occasional breakdowns or interruptions. Instead of being a support, the system became more of a hindrance. Indeed, as observed during the three and a half-week site visit, some of the technology-related emails (see Table 5-1) sent out to staff were notifications on the paperless system’s (Compass) poor performance (i.e. ‘very slow’). Hence, because of the absence of paper case files, Suzanne felt paralyzed when the system went down. As she remarked, ‘without having a paper file, when things like these happen, there is nothing that you can do. And I really dislike that, to be locked in to technology such that I can’t do anything

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unless I have it’. But, given DAFS’ huge investment to create a paperless

environment, Suzanne and others might just have to find themselves locked in for a very long time.

Table 5-1 Email notifications of system performance