TWC's TWIST System

Background

Directed by House Bill 1863, the State of Texas consolidated 28 employment and training programs under one umbrella - the newly created Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). TWC then partnered with local workforce development boards (LWDB) to deliver program services to 28 different areas across the state. Program services including Employment Services (ES), Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), Rapid Response, Workforce Investment Act (WIA), Welfare-to-Work (WtW), Choices, and Food Stamps Employment & Training (FSE&T) are delivered at workforce centers setup and managed by each LWDB.

The primary goal of the workforce centers is to provide customers with all of the program services that they are eligible for at one location and with one application. The old business model forced customers to apply for program services multiple times at multiple locations. That was because each of the employment and training programs had their own office and their own information system that didn't "talk" to any of the other ones. The old business model increased customer frustration, staff workload, and data redundancy, and it also reduced data integrity. The caveat to moving forward was that the current information systems were not going to support TWC's vision for a centralized point of intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting.

TWC addressed this by creating a project team tasked with developing an information system that would consolidate as many of the employment and training programs as possible. That system is The Texas Workforce Information System of Texas (TWIST). The system is a client-server based application, developed using an n-tier design with PowerBuilder for the front and middle tiers. The middle tier is an EA Server platform running on Windows 2000 Servers. The database is Sybase ASE running on an IBM AIX box.

TWIST is the information system that TWC envisioned for its new business model of a centralized point of intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting. It enables workforce center staff to enter intake information for customers just once for multiple employment and training programs and to retrieve it statewide. TWIST also includes functionality allowing workforce center staff to query and retrieve information from the legacy systems - Employment Services (ES), Unemployment Insurance (UI), and the Integrated Database Network (IDBN) including Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and SSI (Supplemental Security Income).

TWIST Implementation

Phase 1 included the development of a centralized point of intake and connectivity to the legacy systems to reduce customer frustration, staff workload, and data redundancy, and to increase data integrity. Workforce center staff continued their use of the old information systems for case management, service delivery, and reporting.

Phase 2 included the changes necessary to facilitate the intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting of JTPA, as well as the conversion of JTPA from CMS to TWIST.

Phase 2.5 included the changes necessary to facilitate the intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting of WtW.

Phase 3 included the changes necessary to facilitate the intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting of Choices and FSE&T, as well as the conversion of Choices and FSE&T from Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) to TWIST.

Phase 3.5 included the changes necessary to facilitate the intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting of WIA, as well as the conversion of JTPA to WIA.

Phase 4 included the changes necessary to facilitate the intake, case management, service delivery, and reporting of ES and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). It also includes an interface with WorkInTexas.com. In addition, we are taking advantage of new software - Enterprise Application Server (EA Server) - that reduced the number of user connections and relieved the processing load on each client PC. Finally, TWIST was re-designed and streamlined with LWDB input to eliminate all references to JTPA and to accommodate changes from a case-driven system to a customer-driven system. Phase 4 was implemented in March 2003.

TWIST-Web Reports

TWIST-Web Reports was implemented in June 2002 and allows for reporting on all of the employment and training programs in TWIST. The TWIST Web Reports system is a web-based application that provides the ability to manage, measure, and report performance for the programs administered by TWC and its Local Workforce Development Area partners (Boards). The TWIST Web Reports system consists of over 100 standard reports.

Many of these reports are accessed on a regular basis. In order to allow for quick access to the information, the reports are processed overnight for the entire state. This allows Boards and their contractors to quickly pull information for their area. The reports include both summary and customer-level details that allow Boards to monitor their performance and understand how individual cases are impacting it.

Original web reports were developed along program lines with reports for Choices/TANF, FSE&T, Project RIO, TAA, UI, and WIA. However in the last year TWC has added numerous integrated reports based on the Common Measures that show overall, system/Board-wide performance and then breaks out that performance by program. These reports both help make it easier to monitor individual program performance and promote integration since they show how each program contributes to the over all results.