June 24, 2013
Technology and Human Services
Technology took the world by storm by creating new and easy ways of performing hand writing tasks that may have taken up a lot of a person’s time. Technology has also found ways to keep records and relay information from one person to the next. Just like the NASW states in their NASW & ASWB Standards for Technology and Social Work Practices web site; “Technology and Social Work Practice to create a uniform document for the profession. Technology has changed social work practice offering new ways to perform services and obtain information. The challenges that it brings require a special set of skills and knowledge to provide the best practice available.”(NASW, 2005) When something new and needing certain skills is introduced to organizations or businesses it can create problems or challenges that may need to be assessed before the use of the technology can be used at the full potential to improve the daily activities within the human service organization. The trick to it all is for an organization to define the challenge and problems and learn what technology will be best used to better serve their clients as well as benefit their own organization.
State the challenge(s), issue(s), or problem(s).
Technology has grown so much in the past decade more human service agencies are using it to help meet the demands to keep their agency growing and expanding new services. One challenge that a human service agency is faced with is generating enough funding to maintain services and helping the needs of their community (Challenges facing human service organizations July 11, 2011). They also need to provide education to employees and proper training to clients. Organizations depend on government funding to provide money, the problem is polices changes and budget cuts. The challenge for some agencies is to have the technology to become more creative to maintain funding. Some issues and problems that can occur is keeping track of the money. An organization needs to have the ability of knowing how much money is coming in and what is going out helps an agency running smoothly and to provide clients and the community with the services they need. Not developing the proper templates, spreadsheets, database, and applications to generate the right presentation to present the status of operations to different organizations that can provide the organization with more funding. Many human services agencies, depending on their funding, keep many of their multiple programs running. This is not an easy task and can become difficult at times. It is critical that an agency have the correct software application that allows them to account funding and also allows them to online banking. This enables an agency to remain more financially organized, effective, and efficient.
Discuss how you solved the problem and determined possible solution(s) The first and foremost area is being aware of what ones funding situation is, and is through the information that is available today via local news, newspapers, and radio stations, each being an avenue of keeping the public informed and are ones that are trusted. Through these avenues an organization can acquire or accumulate donations all because the organization made it a point to make the community aware of their cause and need. Newspapers, news and radio stations will, periodically, follow-up with the results and success of the fundraising efforts to the public. Depending on the privacy restrictions of the organization, using volunteers instead of traditional employees can greatly decrease the strain on the organization's salary budget. The organization can train the volunteers to perform the same tasks that traditional employees perform. The organization can draft a contract for volunteers that will clearly state that volunteers will assume all responsibility for any privileged information they divulge.