The earlier personas, journeys, and concepts gave DCHS a picture of what a more integrated experience could look like. This section asks which parts of that picture have become real work, which remain intentions, and what should happen in what order.
DCHS Insights CX Human-Centered Design @ DCHS PROTOTYPE no real data DCHS Insights CX How We Integrate
How we make service integration a reality
Planning question: What have we completed to date? What is underway? What is planned? The composite personas whose journeys we mapped help us assess the portfolio from their perspective. Use the two organizing views to see where each part of the work is going, what is missing, and what should move next.
Read the portfolio as a plan
Use the client lens to move from what exists to what is missing, what matters most, what depends on what, and where there is enough readiness to begin.
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Start with the client lens
Carry Janice, Aboul & Hossina, and Marisol into this portfolio. Ask what clients would notice, what their journeys still need, what is missing from the work, and what that means for priority.
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Find the visible gaps
Look for a thin pillar, a persona need with no initiative, a missing client-visible result, or work that has no credible next stage.
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Test sequence and readiness
Name real dependencies and ask which team could begin—not only which idea matters most.
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Check the initiative detail
Confirm the description, partners, status, and persona effect with the people doing the work before treating the portfolio as settled.
Define service integration for a person
Start with a persona and describe the aim, the signs of an integrated department, the two changes that could get us there, and the two risks most likely to stop us.
Open the planning worksheet — four prompts, one printable page →
Portfolio status
Completed, underway, and planned are initiative statuses, not maturity stages. Start with this three-way sort before introducing a framework.
Completed 2
Underway 10
DCHS Service Atlas One-Stop Shop Contact center modernization One-Stop Shop HCS Modern Case Management System Implementation Shared Knowledge PULSE — the weekly report Shared Knowledge Admin Services Integration One-Stop Shop Insights 360 Dashboards Shared Knowledge Credible Dashboard Shared Knowledge Same Day Access Integration Coordinated Care Community Analytics Dashboard Accountability DCHS Key Indicators (revision) Accountability
Planned 4
Questions for deciding what moves next
The original guiding questions are grouped here by the kind of decision they support. They apply in a workshop, a one-to-one, or an individual review.
Reality and gaps
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What is missing?
Name one thing that would have changed Janice's morning, or Marisol's fifty minutes, and that nobody is working on. Anchored to a person the answer is specific enough to act on; unanchored it becomes a wish list.
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Would any of this be visible to our personas?
If Janice walked in tomorrow, which of these would she actually notice? And Aboul and Hossina? It converts a list of organizational activity back into the terms that started the conversation.
Priority, sequence, and readiness
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What do we prioritize?
Because the list contains more work than can move at once, select the two initiatives that should advance this year and identify what will be deferred.
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What has to come before what?
Some of this work only pays off in a particular order: screening for other needs is hard to justify before there is somewhere to refer people, and a referral system is hard to build before the catalog it draws on is trustworthy. Which dependencies are real, and which are just the order we happened to think of things in?
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Which part of the organization is most ready to move?
Assess which teams have the capacity and readiness to begin, in addition to considering the importance of each initiative. Confirm that assessment with the teams responsible for the work.
The organizing model
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How should we group this work, and what does progress look like?
A roadmap needs clear categories, stages, and sequencing. The draft maturity model offers two views of the same initiatives and one shared set of four stages.
Where this is going
The same two organizing views, each column stating one destination and the initiatives that would get there, in order. No stages: this is the short version of the draft maturity model, for a conversation about direction rather than about the framework.
Current view: five strategic pillars
One-Stop Shop
Universal Screening
Shared Knowledge
Coordinated Care
Collective Accountability
Definition What each one covers
Creates a unified entry point for all services, with consistent, predictable methods across every service area, so that a client does not have to understand how the department is organized in order to get help from it. Staff see themselves as one team with a “no wrong door” mentality: whoever a client reaches first takes responsibility for getting them to the right place.
Systematically identifies client needs across all service domains at every entry point, so that no critical need goes undetected. Every client interaction becomes an opportunity to look past the presenting issue to the full range of challenges someone may be facing — including the ones they did not come in to talk about.
Ensures that all providers have access to relevant client information while maintaining privacy and consent: shared case management, real-time collaboration, unified communication channels, and 360-degree client profiles. The point of all of it is that clients should not have to repeat their story at every engagement — what they have already told us travels with them, with their consent.
Coordinates and aligns services across programs to maximize impact and minimize gaps: joint service planning, synchronized interventions, warm handoffs, and integrated case management. Services work in concert rather than in isolation, so each intervention builds on and reinforces the others instead of pulling against them for the same client’s time.
Instead of each program measuring only its own success against its own quality standards, accountability organizes around the client's holistic outcomes. Every partner is invested in that client's overall wellbeing and progress, so what counts as success is whether their situation improved.
Initiatives What would take us there
Physical co-location (Mark Center) DCHS Service Atlas Wayfinder kiosks Contact center modernization AI-Assisted Service Atlas Admin Services Integration
Legend
- Completed
- Underway
- Planned
Alternative view: four operating domains
Setting Where
Practice How
Platforms With What
Governance How Well
Definition What each one covers
Where services happen. Facilities, community locations, phone and SMS, web and apps, kiosks, wayfinding, and cross-channel access.
How work gets done. Staff capabilities, programs and services, workflows and pathways, referrals and handoffs, partner arrangements, and operational policy.
What enables the work. Systems, data, records, directories, case-management and referral tools, integrations, and cross-program information flows.
How work is directed and assessed. Decision rights, department standards, strategic policy, privacy and data governance, performance review, public reporting, partner accountability, and automated-decision safeguards.
Initiatives What would take us there
Legend
- Completed
- Underway
- Planned
Each list is ordered the way the full model reads that column, but the numbers are only a sequence — they do not name a stage. Open the draft maturity model for the four stages, what each one means, and the cell every initiative sits in.
Posters, for the wall or a working session: Five pillars Five pillars, blank Four domains Four domains, blank All posters
Questions by strategic pillar
The current pillars remain useful strategic themes. Use these prompts to examine what would have to be resolved before work in each one can move forward.
One-Stop Shop
- “No wrong door” is a staff commitment before it is a system. What would have to change in how a team works for it to be true?
- Where does someone end up when they arrive at the wrong place — and does anyone find out?
Universal Screening
- Screening surfaces needs we then have to do something about. How do we make sure that the resulting referral doesn't go into a black hole?
- Who operates the instrument — the client, or a member of staff? The three prototypes make different choices.
- What is the smallest question set we could ask of all clients?
Shared Knowledge
- What information from across DCHS would help frontline staff recognize needs, explain options, and connect clients to the right program—and how should that information reach them in the flow of work?
- How can data collected separately by programs be translated into coherent, timely insights that help leaders see patterns, gaps, and shared outcomes?
- When information about a client needs to travel across programs, what should be shared, with whose consent, and who needs access to act?
Coordinated Care
- Who is accountable for a client that three programs are each partly serving?
- What are the key enablers for move towards joint service planning and communication, across programs?
Collective Accountability
- Almost everything we currently count is counted because somebody outside asked for it. What would we measure for our own benefit, even if nobody were asking?
- How can we move towards department-wide standards of quality; in which domains; and how can we track program performance against this common set of standards?
A short, sequenced set of commitments
Carry forward a small number of priorities, each with a client-visible result, a dependency, a ready team, and a first step.
| Priority | Client-visible result | Dependency | Ready team or pilot | First step | Review point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|