Automation and reskilling help Family and Children’s Services better serve Tulsa

Nonprofit behavioral organization Family & Children’s Services is turning to IT automation as part of a transformation strategy aimed at enhancing the organization’s ability to serve health professionals and clients in its community.

FCS serves the greater Tulsa area through outreach programs, crisis hotlines, career center services, and a wide range of addiction and mental health services for children, families, and adults. The organization runs more than 75 programs, including family counseling, child abuse and trauma support, and programs to help with substance abuse. It also offers services at more than 50 local schools, serving over 150,000 people a year.

“Roughly one in six Tulsans are impacted by the work we do and whether they’re directly a client of ours, or they have a family member that is client of ours, it’s a pretty large impact in the community,” says Brent Harris, CIO of FCS.

Since it became a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic in 2021, FCS has nearly doubled in size. Now with around 1,500 employees, including physicians, nurses, therapists, and case managers, FCS IT has found itself under pressure to support a significant level of growth, Harris says.

“While we are well-funded and have excellent support, we do from an IT perspective recognize that every dollar we spend is a dollar taken away from potential client care,” says Harris, noting that efficiency — automation in particular — has become a top IT priority.

Managing growth

With FCS’ rapid growth, end points have become one of the nonprofit’s biggest vulnerabilities, Harris says. Securing devices became especially important during COVID, when employees started working from home and clients accessed services virtually. Even after restrictions lifted, the landscape of work has changed for FCS, with many employees not fully returning to the office and some clients still preferring telehealth. All of this has led to more devices to oversee, update, and manage.

To address this issue, Harris partnered with autonomous endpoint management (AEM) vendor Tanium. Prior to the partnership, FCS’s lean IT team was challenged to push out updates to devices securely, unless employees came into the office. But with more employees working over VPN from home, that became less reliable, and it was more difficult to keep tabs on technology assets. Now, with Tanium’s platform in place, Harris’ team can feel more confident that updates get propagated to all employees, including those who are always offsite.

During the implementation process, Harris’ team discovered FCS was out of compliance with certain vendors due to having varied software installed throughout the company. The team also identified assets they had previously thought were decommissioned. “Insight into what was out there” greatly helped FCS IT in remedying those issues quickly.  

One of the first big projects Harris’ team worked on with Tanium ended up paying off in a tragic life or death situation. On June 1, 2022, a gunman entered Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa with an AR-15-style firearm and semi-automatic pistol. The gunman blamed his surgeon for ongoing pain following a procedure, according to a note left behind, went to the second floor of the hospital, and shot and killed four people, injuring others, before taking his own life.

FCS, which works directly with healthcare staff, nurses, physicians, and other medical staff at Saint Francis Hospital, was able to use the Threat Response feature of the Tanium platform to push a notification to all staff and clients about the active shooter situation taking place. Prior to that project, everyone being synced to the network and able to receive threat alerts was not guaranteed.

Upskilling for transformation

Harris’ end-point management initiative is part of a broader emphasis on automation to help free up IT personnel to be assigned to projects that “add more value than doing mundane tasks that can be repeated,” he says, adding that every hour saved can be redirected to helping “improve client care, reduce risks, and provide better data for people to make decisions.”

To that end, Harris is working to upskill and reskill individuals on his team who might be good fits for focusing on RPA, AI, machine learning, and building chatbots, among other emerging skills.

And he’s found FCS’ upskilling efforts to be a mutually beneficial arrangement. Employees receive training that helps the organization bridge skills gaps, while the employees get a chance to grow their skillsets and careers, bolstering retention and employee satisfaction. Plus, with increased automation, IT workers have more time to fit training and education into their daily schedules.

“We want to give them new skills and feel like they’re being challenged [rather than] stuck in a more mundane, repeatable [role] where every day is the same,” Harris says. “So, we have been upskilling several of our staff in areas where they perhaps have more long-term career interest.”

But transformations like FCS’ come with challenges. Chief among them is fostering the cultural changes necessary to get everyone up to speed — inside and outside of IT — on new software, services, and platforms. For IT pros at the nonprofit who had built up “quite a bit of expertise” around legacy tools, “unwinding” from those tools took a little work, Harris says. And making those adjustments takes effort from leadership to pave the way.

Next up, Harris plans to upgrade to Windows 11 in a “full blown rollout,” along with changes to how FCS does hardware encryption and key management. The AEM platform in place will make that much easier.

But for Harris and team, FCS’ ongoing transformation is all about the community the nonprofit serves. “We’re just trying to keep the agency safe and secure and give them computing environments and applications to enable the agency’s mission of helping people in Tulsa,” he says.