“No Wrong Door” Integrated Data 

Overview

Customers often face multiple intake systems when interacting with the state’s workforce system. These challenges can discourage customers and slow progress. The Workforce Board is committed to improving the workforce development system by addressing the pressing need for better interagency coordination. This can help ensure a fluid, efficient, and effective delivery of workforce development services for taxpayers. Learn more about the “No Wrong Door” integrated data initiative.

Background 

Workforce development services in Washington and nationally are made up of a complex system spread across multiple agencies and funding streams, each with their own administrative policies and procedures. Navigating these disparate agencies and processes poses a challenge—particularly for individuals with multiple or significant barriers. These individuals may have the greatest need to leverage bundled services but are also those that would experience undue hardship in navigating a fragmented system. Additionally, intake and service planning do not easily transfer from one program to the next. Customers must often start over at each stage of service delivery. This has culminated in “intake fatigue” among jobseekers, who must not only share their personal and, often, difficult story to multiple providers but also experience redundancies of having to complete comparable forms or provide different sets of documentation for similar eligibility requirements. 

Challenges persist past the intake process, where silos across administering agencies adversely impact effective service planning. Information is not readily or systemically shared across agencies, even in cases where these agencies are serving the same customer. Opacity of information across workforce agencies prevents frontline staff from knowing what services a customer would be eligible for across partner agencies, supports that have already been received, where there are still gaps in services, challenges in coordinating services, or lacking procedures (like automating eligibility or referrals) to better serve jobseekers.  

These compounding challenges lead to confusion navigating services, wasted time across intake and service planning, unnecessary frustration, and even cases of participants walking away from services. Surveys, community forums, focus groups, and administrative data review have reaffirmed the known systemic barriers for efficient and effective service delivery. Efforts to address these challenges have consistently identified technology and data sharing as a needed step towards an integrated workforce development system. Integrated data sharing would remove redundancies that occur at intake, allowing information to follow customers across agencies for needed services. It would also enhance visibility of the full spectrum of services a customer has or needs to be receiving for effective service planning and coordination. 

The collective of these challenges reverberates through all aspects of the workforce system, including jobseeker preparation for employment or skills progression and a prepared workforce to meet the needs of employers. These challenges can be addressed by realizing a whole, integrated workforce system in the state—working as a unified body to best serve jobseekers and employers. This project represents the collective multi-agency state workforce system and its shared strategic priority under Washington’s Talent and Prosperity for All (TAP) workforce plan to realize Washington’s mission for a “no wrong door” approach to seamless and coordinated workforce service delivery.  

Integrated data sharing as an initiative has a long history at the Workforce Board. This initiative began with the formation of a Common Intake Committee and the Integrated Service Delivery Workgroup in 2016. The Workforce Board commissioned a comprehensive study of system integration improvements to Washington’s Workforce System (2018), where a lack of data sharing was consistently identified as a source of numerous systemic inefficiencies and challenges.  Please view the latest legislative report of project updates.