WebFOCUS Manages Financial Reporting for Commonwealth of Kentucky

Self-Service BI Solution Created in Just Six Months

Government agencies face constant pressure to improve their information systems and eliminate inefficiencies. For financial professionals like Rachelle Wilkins, who works for the Office of the State Budget Director at the Commonwealth of Kentucky, running a lean agency means always knowing the status of budget expenditures and being able to quickly and easily analyze financial data. "Knowing where your agency stands relative to budgets and expenditures is critical for good management," says Wilkins.

Kentucky's State Budget Director oversees policy, budget, and economic issues facing the Commonwealth and works to ensure fiscal integrity and continuity for the entire state government. It's an important job with a lot of visibility, both within the various state agencies and among the public.

To meet its budgetary requirements, the Commonwealth of Kentucky selected Information Builders' WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform as the foundation of a new system called Financial Analysis System2 (FAS2). State employees in the Office of the State Budget Director and the Finance Controller's office are using the BI system extensively for the budgeting cycle and related processes.

Kentucky's former financial reporting system was based on FoxPro and other legacy database systems. Wilkins says it was difficult to maintain and difficult to apply to daily activities. The commonwealth had decided to replace this aging information system with a Web-based system that many different agencies could assess. The new financial system and associated reporting tools had to be available within six months to support the next budgeting cycle.

The State of Kentucky evaluated BI technology from Information Builders and Business Objects. Developers also considered creating a new BI system from scratch with Microsoft .NET and Javaâ„¢ tools. They decided to use WebFOCUS because of its excellent performance, flexibility, ease of use, and rapid development capabilities for creating custom reporting solutions.

The state purchased WebFOCUS Report Server, BI Dashboard, and Developer Studio, then asked Information Builders Professional Services to install the software and help them get started. Several developers, including Mike Grisham, IT specialist for the Office of the State Budget Director and Jeremy Rogers, resource management analyst for the Finance, Customer Resource Center, attended an Information Builders' training class to learn the capabilities of WebFOCUS standard and ad hoc reporting. "The training professionals were very proficient, and we adapted quickly to the WebFOCUS software," says Grisham, who is the lead developer for FAS2.

A Software That Meets Deadlines

Using the robust BI capabilities of WebFOCUS as the basis for FAS2, the Commonwealth of Kentucky met its deadline, deploying the first phase of the system in just six months. Lori Thorell, a Project Manager, Office of the Controller, credits Information Builders Education department for preparing the FAS2 project team to complete the project so quickly. "The education services were an important aspect of our success, particularly given our aggressive implementation schedule," she says. "We had to get up to speed quickly to meet our deployment deadline, and Information Builders got us started down the right path. WebFOCUS has a short learning curve," she adds. "It is intuitive and easy to use, and there is no need to be an SQL expert to develop powerful and useful reports."

Thorell's office maintains internal accounting controls, operates the accounting system, and reports financial results to management and the public. It also coordinates the program, budget, and cost management components of the state's long-range business planning process. Financial reporting figures prominently in everything this office handles.

WebFOCUS provides a robust platform for financial reporting and analysis, giving state employees the insight they need for financial planning, budgeting, and control. It combines all the functionality of query, reporting, and OLAP tools into a single solution with one common interface. Developers can rapidly create and deploy compelling reporting applications. WebFOCUS also supplies all the features people need to use reports effectively and drill down into the data. State employees simply need a Web browser to obtain and share information.

Removing Barriers Between Users and Data

According to Thorell, the most challenging part of the development cycle involved adapting the state's existing security model to enforce the roles, permissions, and security constraints that protect sensitive financial data. WebFOCUS provides security and protection on many levels, including system, application, database, and field value. This flexible security infrastructure integrates with existing sub-systems, including operating system, DBMS, and Web-level security.

Wilkins and Grisham created an effective architecture for delivering current data to state employees. FAS2 includes a financial data mart, which is updated nightly, along with a self-service reporting environment that is accessible to all state agencies through a standard Web browser. Data is stored in Oracle Database 10g on a UNIX platform. The WebFOCUS report servers run in a Microsoft Windows environment.

FAS2 primarily provides up-to-date information about departmental expenditures and revenues. For example, the Expenditure Analysis and Revenue Analysis modules let users from all agencies track their projects. Having user-friendly query and reporting tools speeds up the process of creating, managing, and verifying budgets. Users can select which data they would like to display for a specific fiscal year, cabinet, department, fund, or function. They can run monthly, quarterly, or annual reports, rolling up data by function, allotment, and appropriation. Users that seek additional detail can drill down into the data mart to display data grouped by object type. All reports can be viewed online or exported to Excel, PDF, and HTML formats.

WebFOCUS also helps the government's financial leaders make educated operational decisions so they can respond to increasingly rigorous budget constraints and reporting mandates. "With WebFOCUS, our budget analysts and financial managers have fast access to accurate and timely data," explains Wilkins.

So far, the Commonwealth has trained 300 users on the FAS2 reporting environment, enabling these government workers to serve the Commonwealth more efficiently. The Commonwealth plans to expand FAS2 to include historical data for expenditures and revenues, along with current data for appropriations, allotments, and capital projects.

Reflecting on a Job Well Done

Looking back on the project, Wilkins believes they made the right choice by selecting Information Builders. She values WebFOCUS for its performance, ease of use, and speed of implementation.

Thorell believes WebFOCUS is well suited for government organizations because it fosters collaboration among dispersed workers and offers many options for accessing, analyzing, and delivering information. "Any organization that needs a data warehouse, data mart, decision support system, or reporting solution should look at Information Builders' products and services," she concludes. "Information Builders has some of the best BI technology on the market for generating accurate, complete, and timely information."