About Us
Learn how Change & Innovation Agency (C!A®) is impacting human services and doing more good.
Our story is one of hope.
As a member of the Vimo® family, Change & Innovation Agency (C!A®) has specialized in modernizing and building capacity for government agencies since 2003, working alongside states and counties nationwide to enhance process, policy, and technology to radically improve the delivery of essential governmental services. We are proud to support over 10,000 agency staff in over 30 states as they deliver effective services to clients each day.
At C!A, our genuine empathy and deep expertise come directly from lived experience. Our team members have held roles as social workers, eligibility workers, frontline staff, administrators, agency directors, policy chiefs, managers, training specialists, and CIOs, giving us personal insight into the challenges government leaders and their teams face every day. Some of our staff have even been our clients themselves, enabling us to see the change process from all angles and craft strategies that keep Business Process Redesign (BPR) principles alive beyond the initial change rollout.
Using our proven and unique methods, we challenge the status quo with innovative solutions that deliver real results. While most companies focus on treating symptoms, we address underlying problems and ineffective systems to help increase your agency’s capacity to have a meaningful, lasting impact on your citizens and communities.
On your most stressful days – when the lines get longer, the stacks of paper and virtual files continue to grow, and the phones keep ringing – we want you to know you are not alone in this important work. The C!A team is ready to step in, roll up our sleeves, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your team to enhance your capacity and lessen your stress.
Let’s get better together . . . and do more good.
From Burnout to Breakthrough
Our philosophy for transforming government
Changing Beliefs
Transforming government requires embracing new ways of thinking, new ways of assessing, and new ways of working. It also requires abandoning the limiting beliefs that have forced government agencies to work with inefficient processes and systems for too long.
We are not defective . . . or all that different.
Sure, government is unique. From politics to regulation to conflicting agendas, we have our hands full. But the operations of government – and the issues plaguing the operations – are no different than those faced in manufacturing, health care, education, and the service sector.
All organizations are collections of systems (processes that produce something for customers in order to achieve results). These systems are easy to see in manufacturing, where the factory, product, customers, and bottom line are all tangible. They are harder to see in government because the things we produce for people aren’t easy to measure with standard metrics.
However, when we adjust our approach and make government systems more visible and tangible, we can more easily identify and implement solutions that vastly improve our processes and outcomes.
It is not a people problem.
Challenged by years of budget cuts, reorganizations, and half-finished technology projects, the systems of government don’t always have the capacity to keep up with changes in real-world demand. To paraphrase Peter Scholtes, “All of the empowered, motivated, teamed-up, incentivized, and accountable people you can muster cannot compensate for a dysfunctional system.”
To improve government, we must improve the systems of government – what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and why. Our results come from our systems. Our customers show up in our systems. Our employees work in our systems. Our costs are in our systems. And our systems could be better.
Changing Systems
The most precious resource in government is people’s capacity to do good. When people in the system, working together with those affected by the system, come together to create a better system, magic happens.
Our Approach
C!A’s team of experienced consultants work with your people to radically redesign the way you do business – helping you increase your capacity to do more good. We are a recognized leader in BPR, and typical client results include serving 40%–130% more customers 70% faster, with an 85% reduction in caseloads, improved fraud detection, higher yielding audits, and significant cost savings.
The C!A approach is to first help staff regain hope in the possibility of improvement, and then help them apply tools that can radically change business processes for the better. We achieve results by:
- Understanding which systems are to be improved, allowing us to effectively measure, manage, and improve those systems.
- Focusing on the process first, not the people. We cannot make workers go faster, but we can find ways to reduce or combine steps in a process to speed up overall workflow.
- Understanding that lasting change is created when the people who work in the process play a major role in the development of improvement opportunities. Only through the people who do the work can we fully capture the complexity of each process and optimally redesign the system. Such an approach helps ensure recommendations are feasible and fit within an organization’s culture.
- Encouraging staff to focus on making customers’ goals their own. We determine what a customer defines as a successful interaction and help staff understand how that outcome is feasible with a redesigned system and how it can be objectively measured.
