State outlines $130 million plan to modernize child-welfare case management
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Summary
DCYF project leaders told the Technology Services Board the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (ProFam/CWIS) is progressing, uses Microsoft Dynamics and Deloitte as the system integrator, has roughly 100 dedicated staff, and carries a $130 million budget over a multiyear implementation; legacy integrations and data migration remain principal risks.
Department of Children, Youth and Families officials and their vendor partners briefed the Technology Services Board on April 9 about the state's Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System modernization (ProFam/CWIS), describing strong early progress but persistent technical and data risks.
Sam Polley, senior IT policy and oversight consultant at Watech, said oversight's "observation is this project is proceeding well" while cautioning that the initiative faces numerous risks before a planned 2029 implementation.
Project director Manoj Bhatma told the board the project has selected Deloitte as the system implementation vendor and Microsoft Dynamics as the underlying platform. He said the program is only six months into design, development and implementation work but had already delivered a baseline demo in March and engaged roughly 100 dedicated resources across state and contracted staff.
Manoj warned legacy integrations are the project's primary technical risk, noting the project has "close to 60 plus interfaces that interacts with different systems" and limited documentation for many of those connections. He described mitigation strategies that include reverse-engineering existing code and ensuring all interfacing partners have test environments so integrations can be validated early.
Project leadership emphasized governance and knowledge transfer. Executive sponsor Jenny Hedden said the project is sponsored from the programmatic side of the agency to keep business needs at the forefront and that she reports directly to the agency secretary; Manoj and Jenny both described contractual and programmatic knowledge-transfer activities and state ownership of critical delivery roles.
Key details mentioned in the briefing include a roughly $130,000,000 program budget over the life of design and implementation, more than 500 attendees at the initial demo, plans for staged work on financial components with design/development for the finance module anticipated in March 2027, and a decision-package submission for continued funding planned for the fall.
Manoj also noted federal oversight items: DCYF plans to submit negotiated contracts and project agreements to the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in mid-April and that ACF typically requires a 60-day review window.
Why it matters: the modernized system will replace a legacy case management platform used for child protective services, foster care, adoption support and related fiscal and licensing activities; given the long-term retention requirements for some records and the system's intersections with many state systems, careful migration and integration work is essential.
Board members asked detailed questions about staffing mixes, how the state will preserve institutional knowledge, and the project's approach to data migration and retention policies. Project staff said they have contractually defined knowledge-transfer deliverables, are front-loading demos and training, and plan intentional data-conversion decisions to avoid migrating poor-quality legacy data.
Next steps: project leads will continue to brief the board on mitigations for integration risk, knowledge transfer metrics, federal approvals and funding decision packages as the work proceeds toward later implementation phases.
