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For many human services agencies, important documents and case information are long gone as soon as they’re filed in the system.

Think about it this way: most basic document and content management systems force workers to wait until the end of a case to scan and file their documents, which means they don’t have access to information when they really need it—while working the case. It’s hard for supervisors to coach and advise workers when they don’t have instant access to information either.

By the time critical information becomes available in the system, the case is already closed.

Within the next four years, the elderly population in the United States is expected to increase to 54.6 million—meaning nearly 8 million more people over the age of 65 in 2020 than there are today.

And what does this aging population mean for your program? You guessed it: Even. More. Paperwork.

Over the past few months, we’ve discussed a handful of factors that can make or break your human services technology implementation. Maybe you’ve read and bookmarked every post, or maybe this is your first time even realizing that this blog exists (in that case, hello!).

Either way, we thought it would be helpful to recap all the handy tips and tricks we’ve shared in an infographic – The Do’s and Don’ts of Human Services Technology Implementation.

Have you ever had to sit in a room for hours upon hours listening to someone explain how a new technology is going to work, and then by the time you get back to your computer and try to start using the tool, you completely forget what you were supposed to do? So. Incredibly. Frustrating.

Not only is it frustrating, but it’s inefficient too. In fact, research has shown that students only retain 20% of information they learn by sitting and listening passively in a lecture-style environment.

Now is the time for government agencies to modernize their approach to document management.

In fact, as we publish this blog post, four out of five agencies are either actively in the process of doing so or planning to in the future, according to research from the Center for Digital Government.

Having the right people on a technology implementation team is make or break for project success. Too often in human services, the right people aren’t involved from the beginning and by the time the project hits end users, it’s dead in the water.

In our experience, assembling a clearly defined team is the first step toward increasing user adoption when it comes to technology. While the number of people involved may differ depending on the size of your agency and the scope of the project, the general makeup should be the same.