Our CATCH partnership with the Delaware Department of Labor (DE DOL) began in 2021. Together, we’ve advanced DE DOL’s data modernization, implemented Data Governance and Data Quality Management programs, and developed proactive measures to prevent fraud. This collaboration enabled DOL organizations to save millions by detecting fraud, reflecting our shared commitment to improving data management and responding to challenges, especially post-pandemic. We’re proud to showcase the results of our partnership in driving meaningful change.
Delaware Department of Labor
A Success Story Partnering with CATCH Intelligence
Background:
CATCH Intelligence has deep experience working with Department of Labor (DOL) state agencies across the United States. Our focus is to help DOL organizations accelerate their systems and data modernization efforts, providing expertise in architecting and building strong data foundations required to support rapidly evolving DOL strategic goals and objectives. CATCH helps DOL organizations put in the guardrails and capabilities to better manage their enterprise data resources by standing up Data Governance and Data Quality Management (DQM) programs and implementing proactive mechanisms to stop fraud, waste, and abuse at the front door. We leverage our expertise in developing and implementing predictive models and advanced data science disciplines. These capabilities have enabled DOL organizations to save millions of dollars by detecting fraud and potential misuse of the system, which has made national headlines due to massive increases in fraud since the pandemic era.
Our multi-year partnership with the Delaware Department of Labor (DE DOL) began in 2021, when our CEO, Mark Floersch, met with the recently appointed Director of the Division at the Delaware Department of Labor. The Director learned about CATCH’s success helping other DOL organizations address their challenges with managing data and moving up the maturity curve to better leverage their data and analytical capabilities to keep pace with external forces of change.
Having been hired to lead the division’s journey to modernize their systems and data landscape, the Director understood the numerous challenges they would need to overcome. He recognized the value that CATCH Intelligence brought to the table with our experience helping other DOLs on similar journeys. With clear vision and strategic foresight, he engaged CATCH as a strategic partner to bring relevant knowledge and experience on Day One, leveraging our deep knowledge of DOL business processes, systems, and data challenges.
Executive Vision and Sponsorship:
A key part of our success, as well as the success of DE DOL over these years, has been made possible by strong executive sponsorship, bringing leadership and vision to DE DOL. This executive champion ensured that the work required over a multi-year program had the necessary leadership support and sustained commitment. The agency leadership’s clear vision created the foundation for a successful partnership, which has yielded many successes we would like to share in this article.
Here is the success story of how CATCH Intelligence assisted DE DOL in their journey.
How CATCH Intelligence helped DE DOL move up the maturity curve with Data Management, Reporting, and Analytics:
CATCH Intelligence recognizes that for organizations to overcome decades of technical debt with legacy systems and data silos intertwined with suboptimal business processes, it requires a comprehensive approach. We address what we refer to as the six pillars of success (People, Processes, Practices, Data Architecture, Data Governance, and Technology). CATCH helped DE DOL move up the maturity curve in each of these areas, beginning with our first engagement in November 2021 when we initiated a Data-Driven Analytics Strategic Planning Assessment.
This assessment provided us the opportunity to develop an understanding of DE DOL’s current state and its vision for the future. The engagement provided great value by examining their data landscape, and helped identify pain points, obstacles, and challenges. This process was crucial in helping DE DOL personnel get a much clearer picture of their existing data landscape and recognize the need for change.
Establishing this change imperative was crucial for the DE DOL team to initiate the cultural shift, necessitating everyone’s involvement to take ownership of their future. The executive leadership and CATCH understood this would mean that, while some might be inclined to resist change, a clear reason for change needed to be established to persevere through the ups and downs of these types of multi-year programs. All parties needed to be on board to reach their end goals and objectives.
The agency leadership appreciated CATCH for bringing knowledge, expertise, and repeatable processes and templates to ease DE DOL through these early days. They recognized that CATCH was helping DE DOL build a critical foundation—not only to transition from their current state but also to achieve their systems and data modernization goals long into the future.
CATCH partnered with the DE DOL team to chart the course ahead with a Strategic Vision and Target Architecture to illustrate the components for the new environment. The architecture supported the multi-year, incremental migration from old systems to new, recognizing that modernization would involve selection and implementation of a new set of core systems to replace their legacy mainframe systems.
The agency leadership also acknowledged that for the new system to be successful, there would need to be a significant investment in getting their existing data cleansed and prepared for the target system. This would require establishing a strong Data Governance Program, creating accountability within the business areas to help with data quality management and cleanup efforts.
DE DOL’s executive team engaged CATCH to establish their Data Governance Program. CATCH delivered education, standardized processes and templates, training and mentoring for data stewards, established DE DOL’s Data Governance Executive Steering Committee and Data Governance Work Group, and implemented procedures to oversee all data-related matters. This ranged from establishing a Business Glossary to creating a Data Governance Program Backlog to track data-related issues, needs, and opportunities. CATCH also assisted in establishing Data Quality Management (DQM) processes and data quality issue identification through the use of data profiling tools, as well as monitoring and tracking issues to resolution.
The agency’s leadership acknowledged that these efforts were integral to establishing a foundation crucial not only for cleanup and preparation for systems modernization but also for ensuring trustworthy data to support mission-critical business decision-making. They noted that the investment in Data Governance already paid for itself by providing data used heavily to stop fraud, waste, and abuse at the front door and support many operational reporting and informational needs.
In parallel to the Data Governance and DQM efforts, CATCH was also engaged to help design, build, and implement a key data repository, which served two purposes: 1) house data for systems modernization purposes and 2) support performance management, dashboarding, reporting, and analytics needs. For systems modernization, data was extracted from legacy systems, validated and cleansed through DQM processes, and transformed into a standardized target data structure. This utilized a reusable data model, designed by CATCH specifically for DOL data, ensuring it was both vendor-neutral and application-neutral.
This critical feature of the model allowed DE DOL to have a well-structured place to house their cleansed and standardized data, providing for a seamless migration to the target system, which had not yet been chosen. The benefit of this data repository is that it greatly simplifies migration to future systems. The data has been validated, cleansed, and normalized into structures that a target system can import far more efficiently than if extracting from legacy mainframe VSAM file structures.
While this data repository was intended to support data migration to a future modernized system, it became very clear to DE DOL leadership that this “interim” data repository had a valuable purpose beyond serving as a stepping stone to systems modernization. It served as an accessible, single, central source of mission-critical data in a queryable (user-friendly) format, providing highly valuable data to address many operational needs, including questions from management addressing new federal requirements associated with the pandemic.
Recognizing this value, the DE DOL team sought CATCH’s assistance to develop reports and dashboards that would meet the new information demands, addressing both internal and external needs. Through CATCH’s experience working with other DOLs, we were able to leverage and reuse several reporting and dashboarding templates to build a Claimant 360 Dashboard, an Employer 360 Dashboard, and a Benefits Executive Dashboard. These dashboards automated and greatly optimized how customer service representatives could quickly respond to inquiries by having information at their fingertips, which previously required toggling between numerous green screens on the mainframe.
Another significant advancement for DE DOL came with engaging our CATCH Data Scientists, who worked closely with the DE DOL team to create several predictive models and data science-related solutions. This was invaluable in identifying fraud, waste, and abuse, and in prioritizing cases to pursue. It resulted in millions of dollars in cost avoidance by catching incidents at the earliest possible stage.
Another area where CATCH helped DE DOL was in setting up Cloud-based hosting and related technology support. CATCH has experience providing necessary services in critical areas such as strong security and meeting FedRAMP compliance requirements.
In recent conversations with the agency leadership, they acknowledged that CATCH was invaluable on many levels by bringing industry-proven best practices, methods, knowledge, and repeatable processes and templates. CATCH not only significantly accelerated their progress but also bridged gaps in DE DOL’s internal knowledge of new disciplines and technologies. Additionally, CATCH addressed their limited capacity to scale internal resources to meet growing demands.
DE DOL today and looking forward:
Through these engagements, CATCH was able helped DE DOL establish critical foundational capabilities that enabled their organization to scale and meet the growing demand for data and reporting/analytical solutions by the information consumers they serve. This positions their organization for success as they continue their path toward systems modernization goals.
DE DOL leadership is very pleased with the progress their organization has made over the past four-plus years. They attribute their progress to CATCH Intelligence, which helped DE DOL advance up the maturity curve and establish a solid foundation. This has positioned them excellently to meet the needs of their customers and information consumers, while also enabling ongoing growth and evolution of their data and analytics capabilities. CATCH has helped greatly streamline their efforts to deliver mission-critical data across the enterprise.
CATCH continues to partner with DE DOL as their next phases of systems modernization evolve, by providing continuous support in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and Data Science capabilities. Together, we are advancing efforts to combat fraud, waste, and abuse, as these challenges evolve and demand increasingly sophisticated solutions over time.
The DE DOL success story is something that CATCH Intelligence is honored to be a part of, and it is one of many examples where we can celebrate with our customers. These testimonials are a reminder of the mission of CATCH Intelligence: bringing world-class data and analytical solutions and capabilities to our customers in both the public and private sectors, delivering lasting value, and being a strategic partner along their journey.
