Online Reporting Portal Enables Self-Service Access to Real-Time Financial Data

Snapshot

Organization City of Montreal.

The Challenge Enhance the information delivery process by building Web-based reporting portals to better equip government staff members.

The Strategy Simplify access to financial reports from a relational data warehouse; reduce demands on a mainframe-based tax system; create a self-service reporting portal to centralize management reports and allow users to perform ad hoc queries.

The Results Marked increase in user self-sufficiency; greater access to management information; and large decrease in demand on the central tax system.

Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Enterprise Integration Suite.

Government organizations were among the first to recognize the potential of Internet technologies to deliver information to the public, as well as to streamline access to tactical information used internally. Today, building on their knowledge and investment in Internet technologies, many of these organizations are enhancing the information delivery process by building Web-based reporting portals to better equip government staff members.

Consider the City of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, where IT professionals are creating an online environment for enterprise business intelligence and financial reporting. "Following the merger of municipalities on the Island of Montreal, we had a great influx of new employees that needed self-service access to our data warehouse," says Hervé Caparros, a programmer/analyst in the City of Montreal's Finance Department. "We used WebFOCUS to create a Web portal for financial reporting, in conjunction with the iWay Enterprise Integration Suite to access data from our Oracle data warehouse. Our users are saving time, minimizing development costs, and leveraging financial data more than ever before."

Consistent Information Delivery

Information Builders helped the City solve data access and delivery issues, a common problem facing many government agencies. Most municipalities rely on hundreds of information systems to conduct planning, service delivery, evaluation, and internal administration. These systems have evolved independently over a period of decades, resulting in a wide variety of legacy systems that are sometimes difficult to integrate with modern Internet technologies. Presenting data to users in a familiar format is an ongoing challenge.

For many years, the City of Montreal has depended on a central tax system called OASIS, written as a CICS/VSAM application and hosted on a mainframe computer. At the start of 2002, following the merger of 27 suburban municipalities into one government entity, the OASIS tax system doubled in size from 200,000 to 400,000 accounts, representing about 2 billion Canadian dollars in receipts. Today it is the only tax system for the entire Island of Montreal. "Expanding OASIS and supporting new users were placing intense resource demands on the City's IT staff," confirms Samuel Kairy, head of IT for the Finance Department.

Under Kairy's direction, the City created a data warehouse to simplify and expand the reporting options available to municipal workers. Many users were already depending on WebFOCUS and iWay Software to access this Oracle environment. Following the merger, Kairy created a reporting portal to redeploy the management information to hundreds of new users. "Our objective was to allow more users to access the data warehouse via the self-service WebFOCUS environment," he explains. "WebFOCUS is much easier to learn and use than the legacy OASIS system because it utilizes a browser interface that most users understand instinctively, rather than character-mode 3270 screens."

New Information Architecture

Kairy and his colleagues envisioned an intranet reporting portal that would simplify access to the Oracle data warehouse and reduce demands on IT professionals for creating custom reports. They constructed the portal with WebFOCUS, opening new inroads to the data warehouse and creating an online environment for easily centralizing management reports. "We developed the new application in less than two months with three programming resources," Caparros says. "We were already using the WebFOCUS Analytical Reporter, so it was not difficult to develop a self-service portal application. All the CGIs and data manipulation routines were already in place."

Today, the reporting portal allows authorized City employees to execute both predefined and custom reports, which can be arranged in menus for other users to access or modify as they see fit. All that is required on the user's desktop is a Web browser – no plug-ins or additional software is necessary. WebFOCUS runs on a Microsoft Windows NT server, while Oracle is installed on a UNIX server running Sun Solaris. iWay Enterprise Integration Suite works as the middleware layer, transferring financial data from the Oracle data warehouse to the users in PDF or Excel format.

"The iWay data hub automatically joins and correlates information from one table to another and presents reporting objects to the users, transforming relational tables in the UNIX-based data warehouse into real financial information they need," explains Caparros. "The information is then accessed with WebFOCUS by dozens of every day users."

All users have access to dynamic menus and can easily share new reports among themselves. "More than 500 reports, predefined or constructed by the users, are accessible through the portal," Caparros says. "Each user can personalize the reporting environment by deciding what reports they see and how they see them. More advanced users create their own queries with WebFOCUS Analytical Reporter."

Online All the Time

Caparros and his group appreciate the reliability of WebFOCUS, reporting an availability rate of 99.9 percent. WebFOCUS uses a server-based architecture to simplify software maintenance, streamline report distribution, and minimize network activity. Thanks to its thin-client orientation, there is no software for end users to install, resulting in a rapid learning curve. When complex queries are submitted, only the answer set is sent back to the user, minimizing network congestion. "Every day reports are removed or added," says Caparros. "WebFOCUS gives employees and managers the flexibility to answer to the population and integrate the changes to municipal finances, as well as to effectively manage receipts."

Since the new reporting portal went online, the City of Montreal has witnessed a large increase in the use of WebFOCUS to extract management information from the warehouse – along with a corresponding decrease in demands on the central OASIS system. According to Anne Marie Roy, head of the Receipts Department, about 300 City employees now have access to the system. On average, the site receives between 50 and 100 visits every day. Roy says her department enjoys being able to obtain financial information in a familiar, easily accessible format. "To be truly useful, information must be delivered in a format that meets the needs of various types of users, whether it's for compliance and enforcement, financial accounting, policy decisions, or distribution to the public," she points out. "Each user has different types of reporting needs."

Some users prefer alert-based reporting, meaning they only want to see a report when something changes. Others want to receive periodic summaries, yet have the ability to drill down into the data when something piques their interest. Still other users need action statements that allow them to set other activities in motion. WebFOCUS accommodates all of these users, allowing them to access financial information using familiar tools such as Web browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF files. "End users now have a great tool to obtain and share the specific information that they need," Roy adds. Caparros concurs. "We expect to increase WebFOCUS usage by 100 percent within six months," he concludes. "The beauty of the system is its simplicity: users simply need a standard Web browser to access this useful self-service reporting application."