Organizing for effective integrated services.

Abstract

Interagency collaboration, as important as it is, is only an organizational technology. When collaboration is in place, practitioners assume that we will be able to deliver appropriate services and, ultimately, improve client self-sufficiency. The literature is largely silent on precisely how interagency collaboration is to lead to more self-sufficient clients. There are many reasons for this, but in fact, agencies-even when they collaborateare structured largely to deliver the services they have funds and authority to deliver. Collaborating with this orientation only ensures that clients actually receive the services they are eligible to receive (Adkins, Awsumb, Noblit, & Richards, in press). Collaboration in this scenario serves to make the agencies more efficient but does little to change their effectiveness.The increasingly complex and diverse needs of the poor demand that professionals begin to consider the effectiveness of agency efforts. The APA Task Force on Comprehensive and Coordinated Psychological Services for Children (TFCCPSC, 1994; see also introduction to this volume) argued that numerous social, demographic, and economic factors have weakened the ability of families t o provide healthy and developmentally appropriate environments for children. This, in turn, has overwhelmed existing, often single-purpose, programs. Increases in funding are needed to provide minimally adequate levels of service, but changes in the needs of clients seem to require interagency collaboration to lead to more cohesive, integrated, and responsive services, and ultimately to increase client self-sufficiency. Achieving effective integrated services will require that agencies change the systems that deliver these services. However, agencies and programs are relatively discrete and insular entities-creatures structured by funding and legislated authority. Historically, it has been exceedingly difficult for agencies to collaborate (Weiss, 1981), which testifies to the challenge collaboration represents t o the ways service agencies operate. The true challenge is to collaborate to design an effective system even as we use it to provide immediate services.In this chapter, two case studies of interagency collaboration demonstrate how organizationally effective interagency collaboration affects the delivery of integrated services. Effectiveness is defined as the institutionalization of the system and the smooth functioning of structures and pro-191