Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology issued the following announcement on Aug. 23.
The State of Illinois is being recognized this week as one of the award winners at the CIO 100 Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Annual CIO 100 Awards celebrates organizations and the teams within them that are using IT in innovative ways to deliver business value, whether by creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth or improving relationships with customers.
The winning project in Illinois is the mobile caseworker application at the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) known as A.S.K. (Always Stay Konnected), allowing investigators and case workers to remotely retrieve and enter case data. Originally started as a pilot in 2016, the solution is increasingly utilized by DCFS staff to improve data quality, efficiency, security and most importantly, the safety of children.
"We are committed to identifying and integrating new technologies that allow us to focus on the safety of the children we serve," said Marc Smith, Acting Director for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). "This mobile app is used to retain updated photos of our children in the event of an emergency or a missing child and it allows our workers to quickly enter and retrieve critical case information while they are in the field. We are proud to be the first state government agency in Illinois to create and deploy a large-scale enterprise mobile app that supports our front-line staff to protect the children of Illinois."
The development of the A.S.K. application utilized a customer-centric approach, based on building an understanding of the challenges faced by field staff and designing the solution with those issues in mind. The users were central to the agile methodology, which allowed for quick response to feedback and understanding user behavior based on metrics.
"It is an honor for our team to accept the CIO 100 Award on behalf of the State of Illinois and stand alongside leading innovative organizations such as General Motors, United Airlines and FedEx," said Ron Guerrier, Illinois CIO and Acting Secretary for the Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT). "The A.S.K. application at DCFS is a notable example of how technology can improve the lives of those we serve at the State of Illinois, which is always the ultimate goal of our IT efforts."
Original source can be found here.
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