Maricopa County Attorney's Office Incriminates Manual Reporting Processes
WebFOCUS Streamlines Case Reporting for 850 County Prosecutors, Managers, and Staff
Deputy county attorneys in Arizona’s Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) prosecute more than 34,000 criminal cases each year. Until recently, bureau chiefs at the office manually tracked details about case assignments, making it difficult to keep tabs on the overall workload and monitor individual attorney performance. Time-consuming manual record-keeping activities were inefficient and cost-prohibitive.
To better keep pace with the tremendous caseload, and to work more efficiently, MCAO needed a business intelligence (BI) application that could provide an instant snapshot of criminal case activity for the bureau chiefs and allow them to drill down to minute details about caseloads, defendants, and charges.
“We examined business intelligence solutions from several leading vendors in the BI arena,” says Debbie Hall, applications development manager at MCAO. “Information Builders WebFOCUS distinguished itself for its ease of use and ability to natively access multiple data sources. With WebFOCUS, we are not only automating internal processes; we are also demonstrating better ways to share information. Ideally, other county agencies can learn from what we have done to work more efficiently and fulfill their charters more effectively.”
Dismissing Old Reporting Practices
As Maricopa County has grown over the years, so has MCAO. More than 15 specialized prosecution bureaus employ several hundred attorneys, investigators, administrators, paralegals, victim advocates, and support staff. The office focuses on implementing, promoting, and participating in programs that reduce crime and enhance the quality of life. The office also provides legal services to the county, its officers, and political subdivisions.
For years MCAO has used a locally developed transaction system called the County Attorney Information System (CAIS), which stores information about cases, defendants, and other relevant data in an Informix database. However, the system had no reporting functionality, so it was virtually impossible for users to look up specific information. Until recently a staff statistician drew from CAIS to create quarterly reports but the static information was at least a month old by the time it was distributed.
Bureau chiefs manually tracked caseload activity using what they called “tick sheets.” Some of the chiefs entered the data into Excel spreadsheets for analysis and to supplement the static quarterly reports. These methods were, however, tedious and lacked consistency from one bureau to the next.
Summoning BI Experts
Hall knew there was a better way to manage and share information. She worked with Carol McFadden, executive chief at MCAO, to put together a BI steering committee of stakeholders who would define the functional requirements for a near real-time solution. Their priority was to develop a BI application that would track case assignments and attorney workloads, and provide dynamic reports that users could drill into. A subgroup of the committee defined the detailed requirements for the solution.
Earlier in the year, the IT team used WebFOCUS for its Criminal History Reporting effort, a project intended to improve accuracy when case, defendant, and charge information is submitted to the state’s criminal history repository. Hall saw that WebFOCUS would also be a perfect tool for managing the case activities of each division and bureau.
The team installed WebFOCUS on a Linux platform and used WebFOCUS Developer Studio to build a Criminal Case Reporting dashboard (CCR) and an Executive Criminal Case Reporting dashboard (ECCR). The team included a WebFOCUS developer, an architect who managed back-end database details, and a business analyst who documented the requirements.
As submissions are generated, they are entered into the CAIS transaction system for attorney assignment and charging. WebFOCUS accesses this data and displays it through the CCR and ECCR dashboards. These applications are currently available to 20 division chiefs and bureau chiefs, and the IT team is in the process of rolling out the dashboards to the entire office, including attorneys, bureau chiefs, division chiefs, support staff, secretaries, and paralegals. MCAO also uses WebFOCUS ReportCaster to automate the scheduling, distribution, and storage of reports to multiple groups of users.
Examining Attorney Performance
Executives access ECCR to obtain graphical reports that summarize high-level activities, such as how many cases have been submitted, reviewed, filed, and disposed, along with the average caseload per attorney, which is also trended month to month over the past two years. Executives can drill down to the same level of detail that bureau chiefs and attorneys see.
Bureau chiefs use CCR to track the attorneys they oversee, focusing on attorney caseloads as well as the status of cases. This information helps them balance the workload and monitor attorney performance, including how efficiently attorneys process cases.
“The dashboards dramatically improve the efficiency with which we can manage this very large volume of activity,” says Mitch Rand, a bureau chief who oversees MCAO’s Repeat Offender Program. “The CCR tool is much more accurate and easy to use than keeping records on paper,” he adds. “I now use CCR to manage the workload, monitor the performance of our team, develop schedules, set goals, and follow up on how well people are meeting those goals. The dashboard makes me much more efficient.”
Previously, Rand used a calculator and spreadsheets to balance caseloads, which was very time-consuming. WebFOCUS streamlines that process, delivering reports on demand to give him all the statistics he needs about attorneys and their cases. “The CCR tool eliminates hours of work each month for me and for the other bureau chiefs,” he says. “That is valuable time we can now devote to other tasks.”
A best practice within MCAO is that attorneys must make a charging decision within 30 days of the submission of a departmental report. Hall’s team was able to set that as a parameter in the CCR so cases are displayed in red if they are past the 30-day deadline, enabling bureau chiefs to easily monitor these assignments and minimize late charges.
“I have much more information on hand to keep my team accountable,” Rand reveals. “I can drill down to determine which cases and what charges have been filed. I can go back through time to find out what an individual did or did not accomplish.”
Judging the Results
The new system is also improving communication between the attorney’s office and other county organizations. The office shares information with other county agencies such as the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) and the Department of Public Safety (DPS). Often, these organizations know what is transpiring within their own agencies, but they lack visibility into how the information flows between agencies.
“CCR improves the visibility of these communications and data feeds, giving departments better oversight, accuracy, and efficiency,” says Hall. Managers can now get an accurate account of attorney performance, attorneys are more interested in seeing reports about their work, auditing has been completely overhauled, and the office has a central record source that eliminates the need for managers to keep spreadsheets outside the CAIS system.
“We love the new dashboards,” confirms McFadden. “Using WebFOCUS, we can keep our fingers on the pulse of the entire organization as well as drill down to each division and each bureau. It provides information that we did not have before.”