BI Improves Services for Those In Need

Seniors and Disabled Persons in Alberta, Canada Benefit From Government’s Use of WebFOCUS

Proactive government agencies are turning to business intelligence (BI) technology to streamline internal procedures and improve the efficacy of service delivery. The public expects agencies to demonstrate that they are responsibly spending their funding and that taxpayers are obtaining needed services. In many areas, economic upheaval and dwindling tax revenues have mandated greater accountability from government agencies, forcing these organizations to construct more comprehensive reporting environments.

To that end, the Ministry of Alberta Seniors and Community Supports (Alberta, Canada) uses BI technology from Information Builders to better serve its client base and achieve procedural efficiency. The ministry turned to Information Builders when internal growth and demand for its services escalated. Users at various levels of the organization needed a simple, easy-to-use interface, the power to accurately drill down through the information, and the ability to export information in a wide range of reporting formats.

Information Builders and the ministry developed a customized product roadmap – a solution that provided the ministry with flexible license terms so it could meet current needs yet have the option to scale at a later date. Instead of a ramp-up of 18 months for a BI environment, the ministry was up and running in 60 days.

Development of the new BI system involved constructing a new business model and delivering more accessible reports to users. The ministry used data adapters from Information Builders’ iWay Software division to directly access production data, postponing the necessity of building an operational data store and data warehouse. They then installed Information Builders WebFOCUS as the foundation of a new enterprise-wide BI environment, in conjunction with enterprise content-management support. Both software environments are now accessible through the ministry’s intranet portal.

Better Information Management Means Better Senior Services

Information Builders provided a versatile solution that integrates well with the ministry’s existing intranet portal. Thanks to iWay’s universal data connectivity and WebFOCUS’ intelligent information delivery, the system meets the needs of a variety of users.

Today, WebFOCUS delivers BI and content-management assets via a role-based environment defined by the system security framework. Users are grouped by function and have secure access to the business processes relevant to their roles. This security framework enables each user to view documents, participate in discussion boards, run reports, and access Web applications that are pertinent to their tasks. The ministry is planning to let users customize their own portal environments in the future.

iWay pulls data from multiple programs to provide a universal view of each client. This enables caseworkers (processors) to quickly access all data on that client – a huge timesaver. In the past, a processor might have had to combine data from multiple programs to obtain a complete picture of each individual. Now, if a senior citizen has multiple issues or questions, the processor can get universal data to handle all of the issues simultaneously.

One function of the ministry is to manage accommodation standards for long-term care facilities.
Finding a suitable facility can be a daunting experience for seniors and their family members. In the past they would have had to visit the individual facilities. Today, provincial inspectors visit the facilities and prepare an assessment of each, providing the ministry with evaluations and compliance data based on established standards. This information is available on the Web for seniors and family members, so they can review and compare all the long-term care facilities online. This Web-based information is especially helpful to family members who reside out of the area.

The ministry also creates productivity reports to monitor how efficiently its agents are serving senior citizens. The agents use WebFOCUS to track how many cases are in their queues and whether they are on schedule to complete them. Supervisors view this same data at a higher level, enabling them to balance the workload as needed.

WebFOCUS lets workers create custom reports through a Web-based interface. They can drill down into the underlying data through bar charts, pie charts, and textual reports.

WebFOCUS is easy to use and tightly integrated with the ministry’s other applications, especially Excel. Users can create reports through an intuitive interface while the organization controls which data is exposed.

Quick Turnaround Leads to Happier Clients

The Education Property Tax Assistance for Seniors program is also under the ministry’s direction. When rapidly escalating property values and the concurrent rise in property taxes created financial hardships for seniors on fixed incomes, the government provided relief by setting the education tax portion of the bill at 2004 levels. In 2008 senior homeowners filed more than 82,000 documents to claim their rebates.

“With so much to process, we asked ourselves if there was a faster way to get rebates to eligible senior homeowners,” says Chi Loo, assistant deputy minister for the Seniors Services Division.

The ministry used WebFOCUS to create a new reporting system that makes it easier to manage property tax assessments. Better reporting technology, in conjunction with an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, dramatically sped up the process of scanning and processing property tax notices. Loo says this approach enabled the ministry to balance the processing workload among the available staff. “The majority of documents were processed about two months earlier than in the previous year – about 75 being processed per hour, as opposed to 75 per day,” he says. “Most importantly, we’re able to get our assistance to seniors faster, even in the midst of increased demand and staffing challenges.”

The ministry has also begun using WebFOCUS with GIS technology to determine whether a high tax bill is related to a property’s location. Call center operators use the same GIS technology to spot patterns in the complaints they are receiving.

“We had a situation where we were getting calls from clients about benefit checks that they hadn’t received,” Loo explains. “We collected the clients’ information, ran a report, and plotted the data on a map to determine if the problem was geographical. This helped us identify a postal delivery problem that was delaying checks in some areas.”

Thanks to its proven capabilities for data management and reporting, WebFOCUS has become the standard reporting platform for this Alberta ministry, enabling it to improve quality and client choice in its continuing care system. It has added value to user productivity, increased motivation, and is helping to build a skilled workforce to support independence and self-reliance for its seniors and persons with disabilities.

“Information Builders helped us understand how to get immediate return on our BI investment with a plan for growing the system as our needs expand,” Loo concludes. “We continue to refine the reporting architecture and enhance our ability to serve the community.”

About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data, and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at informationbuilders.com.

About iWay Software

iWay Software, an Information Builders company and the world’s leading adapter vendor, accelerates business integration by providing tools that make service-oriented architectures easy to implement. Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. The biggest names in software, including BEA, Microsoft, and SAP, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integration choice – standalone or with other middleware.