Base on the Case study above please under the following questions:
- Does many people with disabilities fear in the case study has anything to do with managerial level and decision environments? If yes, please explain how. If no, please state why you think contributed the fear.
- Consider yourself as a disable person, please employ different mode of decision making, to justify the decision of stay unemployed.
- Consider yourself as government organisation, please employ different mode of decision making, to convenience people with disability to work. Note: You should address the flaws in human decision-making in this part of your answer.
- Analysis WorkWORLD Decision-Support System and explain how it can help decision-making process.
Hine_lo COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM September 2004/Vol. 47, No. 9 85 M any people with disabilities fear they will lose essential benefits if they go to work [5]. Indeed, pro- grams such as Housing Rent Sup- plements, Supplemental Security Income (Title XVI), Disability Insurance (Title II), Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families have associated bene- fits that disappear or are significantly reduced when a beneficiary’s income or resources rise beyond thresholds that are difficult to predict. Benefit pro- gram policies are extremely complex and interact with each other. Moreover, they are administered by multiple agencies, each of whom has personnel available to help beneficiaries make employment- related decisions. Unfortunately, personnel are often unaware of or misunderstand the interpolicy issues that exist. Benefi- ciaries are forced to deal with multiple experts who do not coordinate with each other. In light of this confus- ing and complex decision-making environment, many beneficiaries are fearful of pursuing greater economic self-sufficiency and, instead, often choose the perceived security of relying on minimal government subsidies. Such realities are reflected in recent data released by the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). Nearly 8.5 million working-age citizens receive Sup- plemental Security Income (SSI) and/or Social Secu- rity Disability Income (SSDI). Approximately 9% of 18–64-year-old SSI recipients receive earnings and 55% of those working make under $200 a month [4]. These numbers are disturbing, given recent reports that many unemployed people with disabilities desire to work [3]. Further, recent research has shown that even people with the most severe disabilities can work when given appropriate support and accommoda- tions, and when their motivation to work is not muted by fear [1, 2]. Empowering Persons with Disabilities with DECISION-SUPPORT TECHNOLOGY A new software system allows users with disabilities, and their potential employers, to make informed choices about job opportunities and the impact those decisions may have on current and future benefits. Michael J. Hine, Mark Hill, David Ruth, Bob Carlson, Dave Banks, and Jim Troxell 86 September 2004/Vol. 47, No. 9 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM WorkWORLD Decision Support In response to difficulties associated with transition- ing people with disabilities to work, the Employ- ment Support Institute (ESI) at Virginia Commonwealth University, through funding from the SSA and others, designed and developed the WorkWORLD Decision-Support System. The goal of this system is to help people with disabilities find employment-based solutions to achieve higher net income through the best use of federal and state work incentives and benefits. WorkWORLD con- siders the interaction of income, benefit programs, and work incentives, and provides expert advice to help a person discover employment-based solutions to matters of income and to better manage their benefits. WorkWORLD is designed to be used by com- puter-literate people with dis- abilities and by employment counselors, benefits coun- selors, and other advocates for people with disabilities who want to work. WorkWORLD is a stand- alone PC application and is implemented in Visual Basic 6 with a Jet Engine back-end and will run on Win98, WinNT, Win2000, and WinXP plat- forms. It has text-to-speech accessibility enhancements so vision-impaired users and oth- ers who prefer audio naviga- tion can use the software. WorkWORLD’s interface is split into inputs and results (see Figure 1). Within the input area, users are asked a series of questions specific to their cur- rent situation. The questions include age, marital status, state of residence, information about benefits currently received, and financial infor- mation such as earned and unearned income. There are currently over 630 questions stored in the WorkWORLD database that are used to elicit information required to process the rules and policies associated with three major federal programs (SSI/SSDI, food stamps, and housing). Users are asked only those questions relevant to their situation. A forward-chaining inference engine evaluates ques- tion display rules to determine which question should be displayed next. As each one appears, context-spe- cific help about the question or information about possible answers becomes available. Once all the questions have been answered, a set of results are generated that appear in numerical, graphic, Figure 1. Current situation elicited. Figure 2. Text results. and textual formats, and are organized as they pertain to SSI/SSDI, food stamp, and housing programs. Text results provide the user with expert knowledge about the modeled situation. There are three different types of text results available: A recommendation sug- gests trying a particular work incentive to see what effect it has on the user’s situation; an alert informs the user of action that must be taken because the modeled situation may have undesirable consequences; and a note provides a user with general knowledge about their particular situation. The numerical results show benefits received, earned and unearned income, and expenses in tabular form for each situation. WorkWORLD will also cal- culate net income for a particular program. The numerical results can also be viewed in a variety of income and expense graphs for greater understanding. Figure 1 shows the WorkWORLD interface after a current situation has been entered for a beneficiary named Mike. Mike has a disability, lives indepen- dently, has a part-time low-paying job, and currently receives a SSI payment. The WorkWORLD calcula- tion engine generates a recommendation suggesting that Mike try using a Plan for Achieving Self Support (PASS) to pay for expenses incurred in preparing for more remunerative employment. The software will dynamically calculate the maximum value of the PASS that would be 100% reimbursed by an increase in the benefit check (an amount based on Mike’s earned income, unearned income, and other work incentives he may be receiving). That calculated value is embedded inside the recommendation’s text and is prevalent throughout many of SSI/SSDI, housing, and food stamp recommendations. If users are unfamiliar with a PASS or require infor- mation on how to model the recommendation using the software, they can click on the hyperlink within the recommendation text result to access the “PASS Possibilities” help topic from the Help Information System—the most complete, publicly available inte- grated repository of information on disability-related policies and work incentives. The help system cur- rently includes 3,207 topics, 16,769 hyperlinks, and 7,019 keywords; it is accessed regularly by federal and state government employees when they need detailed information about policies and incentives. Users can choose to make changes from their cur- rent situation to test future what-if scenarios. In our example, a user may want to see the effect of the PASS recommendation on Mike’s situation. The change is entered as a new situation based on the original entry. This creates a new column (situation) in the input and output sections allowing for easy comparison between multiple situations. When a new situation is created, the user has the option of basing it on any of the exist- ing modeled situations. The base situation’s answers are automatically copied into the new situation. Only the changed items require entry and benefit and income changes compute automatically. The PASS in the example is used to pay for com- puter training and for transportation costs to get to the training (totaling $257.50 per month). This train- ing will allow Mike to increase his skills and subse- quently pursue more ambitious job opportunities. Figure 2 shows the WorkWORLD interface after two subsequent situations have been entered. After modeling the PASS situation, WorkWORLD recom- mends the user see what happens when Mike earns more money. The user creates a new situation where Mike earns $1,200 per month (which is realistic given the training he received using the PASS) and must pay $100 in commuting expenses. Based on this situation, WorkWORLD alerts the user that Mike will lose his Medicaid benefits unless he can prove he needs Med- icaid to work. By clicking on the “Keeping Medicaid” hyperlink inside the alert, the help system provides detailed instructions on how to “demonstrate to the SSA that Medicaid is required to work.” Work- WORLD again informs the user that Mike qualifies for a PASS, and also recommends the option of using COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM September 2004/Vol. 47, No. 9 87 Recent research has shown that even people with the most severe disabilities can work when given appropriate support and accommodations, and when their motivation to work is not muted by fear. a Impairment-Related Work Expense (IRWE) work incentive. An IRWE can be used to pay for up to 50% of items or services that are necessary for a person to work. The user models one more situation that uses a $100 IRWE for Mike’s commuting expenses. Figure 3 shows a summary of the SSI/SSDI numerical results after all four situations have been modeled. In Situation 1 (SSI low-paying job), Mike is earning $600 per month and receives a SSI check of $294.50. In Situation 2, Mike has $257.50 in employability invest- ments (modeled as a PASS). This amount gets added to his SSI check and is subsequently spent on training. Mike has the same net income as in the previous situation, but he is getting training in com- puter usage. In Situation 3 (better job), Mike takes a new job that earns $1,200 per month, has $100 in travel expenses; his net income increases to $1,100 per month. He no longer receives a SSI check because his countable earnings exceed a threshold limit that deter- mines eligibility. Finally, in Situation 4, Mike uses an IRWE to pay for commuting expenses, which, in turn, reduces Mike’s countable earnings; he now receives a small SSI check of $44.50 and his monthly net income increases to $1,144.50. This simple example demonstrates some of the functionality of the WorkWORLD software. More complex situations taking into consideration many more factors and programs are modeled regularly by users of the software. Who is Using WorkWORLD? The WorkWORLD software has been requested by users from every U.S. state as well as from Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, People’s Republic of China, and Portugal. Approximately 200 unique users request the software every month. WorkWORLD is being adopted at institutional levels in several states. Employees in Georgia, Vir- ginia, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa, Pennsylvania, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Jersey, Tennessee, Louisiana, Massa- chusetts, South Dakota, and Missouri have been for- mally trained on the software. The North Carolina Division of Rehabilitation Services started using WorkWORLD to help improve services to recipients of SSI and SSDI. Benefits coun- selors use WorkWORLD to model and discuss a variety of short- and long-term alterna- tives for the consumer. WorkWORLD has been used for over 400 individuals often leading to approved work-incentive usage, detection of over- and under- payments, and better interagency coordination of ser- vices. The system has detected current or future over-