Policy & Practice | Spring 2025

understand child welfare. Both Teams end up feeling the other Team simply does not get it. The real problem is we got it wrong in design. We get it wrong when vendors don’t put people on Team One who have worked in child welfare. We get this wrong when we write off Team Two as resistant to change and fail to under stand the urgency of the matter at hand. We can get it right if we get Team One and Team Two into the same conversation in Discovery. Doing that would mean vendors would always build teams that included members who had years of experience in public child welfare systems. It would also mean listening, really listening, to what child welfare professionals are telling us their technology needs them to do.

one is the kicker—is “parent.” They are the parent for the child they are serving. They know they are the end of the line for that kid and, furthermore, that no one else is coming. For them, filling out the form is how they become the “parent.” They stand on that line and protect the very life of the kid they are serving. So, you see, for Team Two, this is not about a tech system or about a field or function. It’s about a life. And it’s their job to save it. We get this wrong when Team One and Team Two gather in Discovery and think they are in the same meeting but actually end up in very different conversations. Team One is trying to burn through a list of finite decisions that they think are more or less binary in nature. Team Two is explaining how it does not work that way. Team One then ends up with the experience that Team Two is resistant and only wants to rebuild their old solution on a new platform. Team Two feels alarmed that Team One does not

or Medicaid or SNAP. These are wildly different projects. They are largely scientific equations. Child welfare, in comparison, is art. It is a counter-intu itive, complex set of assessments and associations. This means that Team One walks in the door to Discovery underestimating the complexity of the magnitude of the task at hand. Next, you have Team Two. Public agencies staff those teams with seasoned professionals who know the ins-and-outs of every inch of their process. These are people who take great pride in their jobs and they get their identity from their role at work. Like most of us, they derive their identity not at the level of title, but at the level of task. For them, there are two tasks that matter for the purposes of this discussion. Their first task has been to fill out the “form”—whatever “form” it was. They know how to fill out every field in that proverbial form to complete a child welfare process accurately. Their second task—and this

Molly Tierney is a Managing Director at Accenture LLP where she leads the firm’s Child Welfare Practice.

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Spring 2025 Policy & Practice