Thursday, December 20, 2018

Make Way for Self-Service Reporting!


By Amy Gilmore, Performance Management Specialist, Office of Child Support

Business Objects database users in Michigan Friend of the Court (FOC) offices will soon be enjoying MiCSES case management data at their fingertips. Self-Service Reporting (SSR) is now officially underway with an approved charter.  The goal of the SSR project is to enable FOC workers to create, manage, and share reports of MiCSES data without having to engage central development staff for each report. SSR will help support counties moving to more data-based decision making by allowing them to obtain the data most relevant to them in a timely manner.

WebI, the SSR Tool

Web Intelligence (WebI, pronounced “webby”), already within the Business Objects application, is the SSR tool. WebI queries MiCSES data from the Data Warehouse.  A development team creates “data objects” for WebI. These data objects use terms that FOC workers are familiar with rather than the technical database terms. The development team is currently working on creating the data objects according to the priorities set by the Michigan Child Support Program.

The SSR user can select fields and filters to create customized reports on demand, as opposed to waiting for an ad-hoc query, which can take days or even months to return. Some examples of useful FOC reports that WebI can currently run include:
  • Cases with arrears greater than a certain amount with no payments in a certain timeframe;
  • Cases with enforcement activity (or no enforcement activity) during a timeframe;
  • Cases where the payer is incarcerated, and the case is still charging a support obligation.

Users will be able to generate a report that they can further customize or export to Excel. This report shows docket financial information, with a table for each primary worker. Note: case-identifying information has been blurred, but would appear in the report.
A worker can create highly formatted reports, including features such as charts and graphs. The worker can also export raw data to Microsoft Excel for manipulation or distribution.  Creating reports is point and click/drag and drop, which eliminates the need for significant technical knowledge.

Pilot

Eleven counties representing various geographic regions and caseload sizes in Michigan have been selected as pilot counties, as well as one user from the State Court Administrative Office’s Friend of the Court Bureau (FOCB). The pilot is expected to kick off in January. At that time, users from the eleven pilot counties and FOCB will have access to the tool, allowing them to start building useful reports with the data available in SSR and provide feedback to the development team.
Statewide rollout for SSR is planned for May 2019. Keep an eye out on mi-support for further updates and training opportunities.

The Development Process

SSR is being developed using the Agile software development approach. This approach allows for, and even embraces, evolving requirements as the development happens. The Agile approach focuses on creating working functionality in short time periods, with the highest priority work first.  The pilot phase will begin with a set of high-priority data objects made available, but development will be ongoing throughout.  Feedback from the pilot will help determine the content and priority for the continued development of available SSR data objects.  Even after the beginning of the statewide rollout, the Agile development team will continue adding data objects to enhance the usefulness of SSR based on feedback from the pilot and rollout. The SSR project is scheduled to continue full-time development and enhancement through September 2019. 

Training

The Training and Technical Communications teams are creating training and support mechanisms to foster SSR usage. WebI is built to be reasonably easy to use, but workers will need some training to be successful. We expect that most counties will designate specific workers to create most of their reports.  WebI also features a great deal of advanced functionality, which not all workers will use.
Overall, we’re very excited to bring the SSR capability to FOC offices. More to come!

Amy Gilmore has been employed with the Office of Child Support since April 2003, starting as a Child Support Specialist. She is now the Performance Management Specialist with the Planning, Evaluation, and Analysis Unit. She lives in Lansing with her husband, two sons, and two cats.