The GEAR archives contain previously posted materials and resources from GEAR’s activities over the years. The separate focus areas outlined in this section were active under GEAR between 2018 and 2021 before being redeveloped into the current strategic components of the GEAR program.
Delaware State Agencies have traditionally operated with significant autonomy. As a result, many administrative and financial service functions are duplicated statewide, resulting in unnecessary expenditures for employee and contractor time, software licenses, and computing service costs. Additionally, financial services which have not been benchmarked against in-kind internal processes, or equivalent private sector processes, are unable to assert they operate with optimal effectiveness and/or at the lowest cost point.
The State will reduce overall financial process complexity and total cost of operation (TCO) by adopting an enterprise financial services delivery model for selected financial and Treasury functions common to multiple Agencies. The Performance Budgeting methodology enables budget decisions to be made about the allocation of limited resources based on the performance of services delivered. The methodology improves the government’s capacity to assess competing claims to limited resources within the budget process. Additionally, decision makers are provided with better information about the performance of programs and policies — thereby shifting the terms of debate from inputs to outcomes and results, i.e. achievements or failures.
The Strategic Planning Process is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization/entity does, and why it does it. The process creates a view of, and set of actions planned for, the future. A formal strategic plan will assist the Governor, Legislature, OMB, agencies and citizens to clearly identify what objectives the agencies will accomplish within a one- to three-year horizon.
With a new administration, and new budgeting system, the time and environment are right to reinstitute performance budgeting and strategic planning. With these two processes re-instituted, OMB will be able to take key information from agency strategic plans and develop performance dashboard for the Governor. This information will then be used to evaluate resource requests in the context of actual achievements, and thereby allow the preparation of a data-driven budget recommendation for legislative consideration.
The program will seek opportunities to consolidate selected Agency financial functions onto common statewide platforms. As an example, the program will identify legacy financial management systems (e.g., Quick Book applications for tracking grants or agencies using separate financial management systems) and recommend the migration of these business processes into FSF, the statewide financial management system.
The Financial Services Delivery program will encourage Agencies to identify opportunities for process improvement to eliminate bottlenecks currently slowing transaction approvals, reimbursements, and related business processes. By documenting and improving critical processes, financial transparency will be improved such that the public will be able to more easily observe and understand how their tax dollars are spent.
In relation to the efforts to improve budget-related processes, the Financial Services program will seek to reinstitute performance budgeting and strategic planning with the intent to use outcome data to make budget decisions about the allocation of limited resources.
Additionally, the program will create legislation to support continuing the authorization for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — in consultation with the co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee — to sweep Special Fund balances into the General Fund as a measure to both control agency expenditures and clear out unused and underutilized appropriated balances for further use.
Finally, the program team will:
The Department of Human Resources was created by House Bill 4, to address issues important to state employees including: improving the delivery of human resources services, encouraging workplace diversity, ensuring uniform, fair and consistent policies, and enforcing policies. The implementation of these actions is reflected in the Governor’s Action Plan for Delaware. Moreover, the need for centralization of Human Resources is recommended in the IVY Planning Group’s Independent Study of Diversity and Inclusion Related Policies Procedures, and Organizational Structure.
The Department of Human Resources is committed to developing a unified approach to human resources administration, improving the effectiveness of operations, and transforming human resources to meet the strategic and tactical needs of State government. Achieving these goals will enhance the quality of services provided to State employees, to those who seek employment with the State, and to the citizens of Delaware through more efficient and effective government.
These efforts will enable the state to leverage data as a strategic asset to make better decisions, target services, reduce spending and deliver innovative digital government services to all Delawareans.
Information Technology Centralization (ITC) efforts thus far have made great strides towards a shared services model, but the initiative is incomplete and is based on an unsustainable model. This is due, in part, to individually negotiated agency service agreements instead of a consistent standardized service delivery model based on total cost of service delivery.
The lack of standardization and governance adversely impacts the state by:
Evaluating and ensuring the State is capturing and categorizing IT spend across the State allows us all to target areas for innovative shared solutions. Specific concerns include:
The Department of Technology and Information (DTI) is working with OMB and the Division of Accounting to establish additional account codes to better define IT expenditures, allowing a more granular understanding of opportunities for cost reduction and avoidance. This, along with an internal project to reset DTI’s service rates to reflect changes in both the State’s IT landscape and the evolution of DTI’s role from direct service provider to service broker, will ensure accurate, appropriate pricing and life-cycling of future State IT investment. This will position DTI to deliver innovative enterprise solutions priced consistently for all agency partners. Finally, by the end of 2017, DTI plans to engage an outside government IT Centralization expert to perform a detailed environmental scan, working with each agency to assess the current state of IT from which to develop a strategic plan outlining the best service delivery means to meet business needs.
It is an increasingly difficult challenge for the State of Delaware to provide services to its citizens within the constraints of the annual budget. The expertise required to advance some of the most pressing strategic and process improvement initiatives — such as economic development, creating an entrepreneurial economy, healthcare innovation and education reform — often does not reside within the public sector.
The GEAR P3 program will seek opportunities to form partnerships that advance critical State initiatives positively impacting the services provided to the citizens of Delaware. Opportunities areas may include affordable healthcare, building an entrepreneurial economy, K12 education transformation, driving continuous process improvement best practices State-wide, among others.
The team will identify State initiatives that are either resource or funding constrained and seek to determine if a GEAR P3 approach can bring enough leverage to drive the initiatives forward. Focused task teams for each P3 opportunity will document a charter and 100-day action plan to build momentum. After the first one hundred days, the team will review results and determine if longer term plans should be developed to drive the initiatives to conclusion. Ongoing initiatives will then either be fully operated by the State — and the specific task team disbanded — or an ongoing public/private partnership will be formed.
Examples of successful P3 partnerships include the Pathways to Prosperity on Education and the Delaware Prosperity Partnership.
The scope of P3 program will be limited to defining, benchmarking, documenting, and overseeing the execution of P3 partnerships that have been formed. The P3 team will ensure that there is full engagement from both the Delaware Business Roundtable and the Delaware State Chamber, as well as the Agencies, Executive Branch and Legislative branches of the State.
The overall Level V prison population has been decreasing since 2013.1 Still, about 76% of former prisoners are rearrested for a serious offense within three years of release from a Delaware secure facility.2 African Americans represent 22% of the state’s general population, 42% of arrestees, 42% of criminal dispositions, 51% of incarceration, and 57% of Delaware’s incarcerated population.3
At times, we have tried to incarcerate ourselves to safety, a tactic that was costly and deepened some of the long-term factors driving crime rates. As the costs of prisons have grown, we have sometimes found ourselves in the perverse position of only being able to afford education, treatment and job training to those incarcerated, because the cost of the overall system limits our ability to fund community-based approaches that might be more cost-effective and do less harm to the families of defendants. Due to cost pressures, decisions involving millions of dollars are often made with less than ideal information, as we do not have the information systems and analytical staff that would help make better decisions.
To make positive reforms, it is essential that the system—police, corrections, youth rehabilitation, treatment and vocational providers, prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, and the information professionals who are vital to everyone—come together to make decisions.
This is an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues and inefficiencies by being more collaborative. Projects should primarily focus on areas that would improve multiple agencies and find savings and/or efficiencies in the system. There is potential for many additional projects once the committee gets together and shares ideas, but some initial thoughts might include the following:
1 Delaware Department of Correction, Annual Report 2016
2 Statistical Analysis Center, “Recidivism in Delaware: An Analysis of Prisoners Released in 2010 through 2012” (November 2016)
3 John M. MacDonald, Ph.D. and Ellen A. Donnelly, Ph.D., “Evaluating the Role of Race in Criminal Justice Adjudications in Delaware” (University of Pennsylvania, September 19, 2016)
The Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) has a commitment to continuous quality improvement in order to build one of the most efficient and effective government agencies in the region. Our aim is to improve the quality of care, and health outcomes for our citizens, while also reducing cost in the delivery of our services. This is commonly termed the triple aim of quality health care delivery, but we know it also must be a set of priorities for our employees as the internal customers of DHSS.
In partnership with the Government Efficiency and Accountability Review Board, DHSS established an Office of Performance Innovation (OPI) in 2017 to begin working on leveraging the best in operations management from the private sector and academia to begin infusing these practices into the 11 DHSS Divisions that provide an array of services to the public. These operations management practices draw from the fields of Lean Management, Baldrige Performance Excellence, Results Based Accountability, and Human Centered Design. Over the course of the first year, the Divisions of DHSS in coordination with Performance Innovation and GEAR, have developed and piloted 30 projects, with an identified $1 million in potential savings.
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Related Topics: Archives, criminal justice, EdGEAR, education, Financial Services Delivery, health and social services, Historical, Human Resources Delivery, IT, Public Private Partnerships
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