The Texas Department
of Protective and Regulatory Services
The Situation
The Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services (PRS) is a state agency whose mission is to protect the unprotected (children, elderly, and persons with disabilities) from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. PRS operates more than 100 offices throughout Texas and has nearly 7,000 employees.
Each legislative session, PRS must provide elected officials and members of the Texas Legislature with information on proposed legislation that impacts the agency and it's constituency.
The Challenge
The government relations division at PRS relied on support staff and individuals in its program to help analyze the impact that pending legislation might have on the agency. Managing the process of the staff's review of bill text, before determining whether more analysis was needed, was a daunting task.
"We needed a systematic way to gather and organize analysis from our subject-matter experts especially since they were located in many different divisions," said Rick Coaxum, a Program Specialist responsible for coordinating bill analysis at PRS. "We then needed to combine the input from the different offices into one working document."
"I was stuck having to manually keep track of whom I had e-mailed which piece of legislation in order to analyze their responses," he said. "Many times, the legislative process moved too fast for us to get the analysis we needed and we had to rely on a report that did not have the full input from all of our subject-matter experts."
The Solution
"When I looked around at what services were available, there was nothing that could match GalleryWatch's Bill Analysis Management System (BAMS)," Coaxum said. "We talked to other vendors who professed to have solutions, but their services required either downloading data from another system or loading software onto all of our analyst's computers, making it an IT nightmare. We needed a service that could merge the legislative process with our own internal analysis process."
The GalleryWatch Difference
GalleryWatch provides PRS with the tools it needs to manage the legislative process. "BAMS has significantly increased the amount of valuable input that we are able to get on a piece of legislation," said Coaxum.
"GalleryWatch's BAMS service allows us for the first time to deal directly and efficiently with all the subject-matter experts," said Coaxum. "Using the BAMS interface, I can see what each individual analyst has written regarding a bill and then merge comments from each one into a final document. The automatic e-mail reminders that are sent through BAMS help ensure that a new analysis is completed on time when a bill is amended, and the bill comparison tool saves our analysts a tremendous amount of time by automatically highlighting the differences between different versions of bill text."
An added benefit of this exclusive GalleryWatch service is that it gives the agency the ability to keep an archived record of all legislation that has been analyzed. This information can be utilized not only throughout the interim session, but also when analyzing legislation for the next legislative session. "We utilize the BAMS service year- round," said Coaxum. "We use the reports when formulating rules and when dealing with requests from the public regarding the agency's recommendations on legislation debated in the previous session."
About GalleryWatch's Bill Analysis Management System (BAMS™)
GalleryWatch's Bill Analysis Management System (BAMS), an enterprise-wide workflow application, manages resources, tracking, analysis, and scheduling for legislative information and research efforts throughout an organization. Task delegation, reporting, analysis, archived bill histories, and notification on bill/ amendment status, are provided with BAMS through an Application Service Provider (ASP) model.
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