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.
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| 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.
