Transforming how early childhood services are delivered in Connecticut
Summary
The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) is a $400M+ state agency responsible for child development services, family supports, provider oversight, and public information — work that affects hundreds of thousands of children and families across the state. We partnered with OEC on a multi-year digital transformation effort that modernized public-facing services, strengthened data practices and decision-making, and built the internal capabilities needed to sustain change across the agency.
The challenge
OEC oversees a complex portfolio of early childhood programs that touch nearly every aspect of a young child’s development and a family’s access to support. But many of the agency’s systems, tools, and delivery practices hadn’t kept pace with the needs of the families, providers, and professionals who depended on them. Families and providers faced fragmented digital experiences, outdated processes, and unclear pathways to information and services.
The gaps weren’t limited to public-facing tools. Internally, OEC lacked modern foundations for digital delivery, procurement, hiring, analytics, and long-term ownership of its own systems. Staff relied on manual processes and disconnected tools that made it difficult to use data for decisions, respond to emerging needs, or sustain improvements once they were made.
OEC needed more than a set of isolated fixes. It needed a partner that could help modernize priority services while also building the internal capabilities, operating practices, and digital foundations required to sustain change over time — a transformation that would leave the agency stronger, not just better served.
The solution
We partnered with OEC on a transformation effort that combined immediate service improvements with long-term capability building. The work focused on three connected areas:
1. Modernizing public-facing services
We redesigned and modernized OEC’s web presence to make it easier for families, child care providers, and partners to access essential early childhood resources. We improved how families found high-quality child care and related services by simplifying navigation, rewriting content in plain language, and organizing information around what users actually needed. To give leadership better visibility into how people interacted with government digital properties, we established a statewide web analytics capability by standing up a web traffic analytics system across Connecticut’s digital portfolio.
2. Strengthening data and insight
We built a streamlined data collection tool for early care and education providers to submit accurate information about the children in their care — replacing fragmented spreadsheets and paper records with a single, trusted source of statewide enrollment data. We piloted rapid, low-risk solutions to better understand barriers to accessing affordable child care, testing lightweight interventions that could improve the family experience while revealing systemic process issues. We also leveraged data and information to improve support for families with young children experiencing homelessness.
3. Building internal digital capacity and resilient operations
We supported the structuring, recruiting, and onboarding of internal digital service experts, helping OEC stand up the in-house talent it needed to own and evolve modern systems. We authored a Digital Talent Management Handbook to guide recruiting, hiring, and retaining digital professionals. We developed practical toolkits to support modern ways of working, including an Agile Procurement Playbook and Data Sharing Playbook, as well as content guidelines. We trained nearly 20 procurement officials in modern acquisition practices through the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Training — Executive Edition. When COVID-19 forced a sudden shift to remote work, we supported OEC’s transition to a virtual operating model by setting up digital collaboration tools and training staff on remote-work best practices.
Taken together, this work improved the experience for families and providers while giving OEC stronger systems, practices, and internal capacity to continue modernizing over time.
The results
- Redesigned and launched OEC’s modernized web presence, making it easier for families, providers, and partners to find and access early childhood services
- Built a statewide enrollment reporting platform used by 508 users across 220 providers, giving OEC a trusted data foundation for funding and policy decisions
- Strengthened the agency’s internal digital capability across hiring, procurement, training, and delivery practices
- Trained nearly 20 procurement officials in modern acquisition practices, accelerating adoption of agile procurement approaches
- Enabled more than 200 professionals to work effectively in a fully virtual environment during COVID-19
- Established a durable foundation for sustained digital modernization across the agency, including toolkits, playbooks, and internal capacity that OEC could own and evolve independently