“Texas 2036 is a nonprofit organization building long-term, data-driven strategies to secure Texas’ prosperity through our state’s bicentennial and beyond. We offer nonpartisan ideas and modern solutions that are grounded in research and data,” according to its spokesperson.
The nonprofit was founded in 2016, and policy areas are education and workforce, health care, infrastructure, natural resources, justice and safety, and government performance.
“We’ve grown exponentially since. We had five policy people on staff then; now we’re at 11,” Osborn said.
She oversees all policy projects and advocates on behalf of the organization through legislative engagement. Some key issues she focuses on are child welfare, cybersecurity and information technology, state pensions and government performance.
Osborn helped write and influence legislation that created the Joint Oversight Committee on Investment in Information Technology Improvement and Modernization Projects.
With an eye to getting projects more efficiently funded, Texas 2036 advocated for the committee and the Technology Improvement and Modernization (TIM) Fund, Osborn said.
The committee has $200 million from federal funding in its hands for distribution to state agencies with planning in place for system updates, database consolidations and various improvement projects. The money sits in the TIM Fund, and both committee and fund were created by House Bill 4018 during the 87th Legislature.
“The problem that we saw was that a lot of these projects were being funded in the two-year legislative cycle. But IT projects don’t usually work in that two-year cycle, right?” Osborn told Industry Insider — Texas during an interview. “They’re either a lot shorter or a lot longer. We saw a pattern where there will be times … that funding would be pulled, or things just change. In 10 years, the technology you’re asking for in 2012 looks a lot different than 2022.”
State technology leaders testified at the August committee meeting and shared their challenges. Some systems were set up two or more decades ago, some are made up of multiple database platforms that aren’t interoperable, and without funding, at least one overhaul could remain incomplete.
An agency CIO said that “digital transformation is critical to our continued success to meet the demand of Texas and the ever-changing environment.”
One area of great interest to Osborn is child welfare, and she has been researching and writing about the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) IMPACT system, established in 1996. According to the DFPS website, the Information Management Protecting Adults and Children in Texas system is used to “document all stages of service of a case, including when someone reports abuse, neglect or exploitation and when those cases are investigated.”
“It was a SACWIS system, which is a Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System,” she said. “That’s what the standard was in the ’90s. So, recently, in the last decade, there’s been a new standard that’s a CCWIS, which is a Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System. This is the new federal standard.”
Osborn with Texas 2036 advocates for revamping IMPACT, she said, whether that means keeping it or creating a CCWIS-compliant system.
Upgrades to state systems such as this mean fewer sunken costs, better interoperability and, ultimately, more state employee time spent on constituents; there would also be less time spent on data reporting, data correction and data consolidation.
“How I feel about DFPS: Less time with data entry, more time with kids,” she said.
