national service

Optimal is the nation’s leader in managing service obligation programs and in designing a Web-based application for case management. In 2007, the U.S.Department of Education contracted with Optimal to establish the National Center on Service Obligations (NCSO). The main objective of NCSO is to collect information to track and report the status of scholars’ service obligations.

NCSO will also provide pertinent information about the service obligation, primarily to scholars, universities, and the scholars’ employers. In this particular contract, Optimal is managing the service obligation for students who commit to work in the special education field in return for post-secondary education scholarships. Optimal is now designing the next generation of service obligation case management application to assist the Corporation for National and Community Service grantees and universities to manage expanded service obligation programs.

measure performance; and conduct real-time, rigorous evaluations of data.The Public Service and Service Obligations Research Fellow will collaborate with other Optimal researchers in writing a white paper on the performance measures for recently enacted and proposed service programs (e.g., CollegeServe-Study) and in designing a rigorous evaluation of a recently enacted service obligation program. The Fellow will also work in collaboration with the NCSO team and application designers.

Optimal’s unwavering focus is on exceeding client expectations. To ensure that projects run smoothly, Optimal emphasizes integrity, effective communication, well-planned internal processes, and peer reviews. To do this, Optimal has developed the Optimal Philosophy, a set of four objectives that help to ensure the quality of work completed by Optimal researchers is of the highest quality.