Successfully Adopting IT for Social Welfare Program Management

In DGO 2003, we first introduced the long-standing Work First 1 project that is inter-disciplinary between social work and computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) with the collaboration of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS). Based on the success in our Work First project, the NC DHHS and UNC-CH have extended the collaboration to work on a similar project to assist in the evaluation of changes to the Food Stamp employment and training (E&T) program in North Carolina. In this paper, we reflect on our experience to discuss some important aspects of successfully adopting information technology in government agencies in order to replicate them in the new Food Stamp project