I had a friend participate as a guest blogger this week for us.  His name is Frank and this is his post.  I hope you enjoy it.

The theme of a class on advanced management practices I attended at the Harvard Business School was...INFORMATION.

Modern management theory focuses on the speed and quality of actionable information. At Harvard they are teaching that critical management information sources must be accurate, real-time, data-driven, and actionable.

1. ACCURATE: Information that is gathered from unreliable sources or is the product of sloppy thinking and faulty logic is useless and dangerous to management.

2. REAL TIME: Management must find ways to source accurate information on a real time basis. Dated information is not only useless but often misleading.

3. DATA DRIVEN: Sales are up is not the same information as sales are up 20%. Payroll is 18% is not the same information as payroll this year is 18% of sales but last year was 21% of sales.

4. ACTIONABLE: Actionable information is information that enables management to makeinformed choices. With the advent of computer software systems combined with the power of the internet, management is often awash in useless data that may be interesting but does not enable them to make better decisions.

I began to reflect on the availability of actionable information to social service management. With rare exceptions, I realized that neither governmental nor non-profit social service agencies provide their management with the level of actionable information that for-profit businesses now require.

The rare exception is...

FAMCare: Recognizing this need, the engineers at Global Vision Technologies designed a data management capability into their case management software. Utilizing Microsoft SQL Reporting Server 2008, FAMCare allows management to pull data into reports such as:

• A supervisors' page with real-time graphs of case notes per user
• A current view of case worker loads
• An assessment of resource and staffing needs
• A tracking of progress toward agency-identified milestones
• An evaluation of case load turnover
• An early intervention report into potential problem areas

Because FAMCare constantly collates information from the individual caseworker's ongoing files, the management information is accurate, real-time, data driven, and actionable.

FAMCare also allows management to customize reports thereby enabling individual agencies to collect information germane to their agency's mission.

FAMCare human services software is not only the most advanced case management software on the market today, but is also an indispensable provider of actionable management information.