WebFOCUS Helps Reinvent Data Access for the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The mission of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development division is to improve the economy and quality of life throughout rural America. Through financial lending and assistance programs, rural communities receive essential public facilities and services such as water and sewer systems, housing, health clinics, emergency resources, and utilities, as well as agricultural cooperatives.

For Victor Vasquez and other public administrators, technology holds the key to improving the services the USDA offers these American citizens. "Our longtime dream has been to integrate our existing data without reinventing all the systems, and without recreating one huge database," says Vasquez, who serves as Associate Administrator for the Office of Community Development. "We had been looking for ways to link the extensive legacy data sources that comprise our rural funding information to a cohesive front-end for analysis and reporting."

For Vasquez and his Rural Development team, this dream has recently become a reality with the help of Information Builders' WebFOCUS' integrated data warehousing and data mining tools. "We can utilize the power of the Internet to grab data to distribute it to our network of USDA clients," Vasquez adds.

With a lending volume that rivals that of the fourth largest bank in the nation, Rural Development has a staggering number of investments to track and manage, and funding programs to analyze for effectiveness. Serving a staff of 5,000 in 900 USDA offices nationwide, the Office of Community Development is accountable for providing accurate and timely information to top policy makers.

Embracing the Existing Infrastructure

With the proliferation of disparate data sources, the Office of Community Development staff has found their efforts to provide mission-critical information increasingly daunting. "Our legacy systems were not well integrated and required skilled programmers to enter and extract data," says Norman Reid, Associate Deputy Administrator. "A different stovepipe system seemed to exist for each program, impairing our ability to analyze where our investments were going and respond effectively to Congressional inquiries."

Early in 1996, the department began investigating ways of accessing mainframe legacy data for analytical processing via enterprise data warehousing techniques. "At first, we thought we would have to get rid of all the existing infrastructure and build a new, costly system," recalls Vasquez. "But we were committed to using what we had and finding a way to make it all work together with a minimal outlay of money."

After evaluating various Web-to-database reporting options, the team turned to WebFOCUS Suite as the solution of choice for their Intranet Data Mining Project. The selection of Information Builders' products hinged greatly on the department's existing EDA license, FOCUS legacy databases, and the capability for any standard Web browser to be used. "We needed a product that uses standard database structures, utilizes existing security schemes, and provides access to legacy data on a wide range of platforms, in almost any format," according to Michael Grisby, a contractor working on the USDA project.

Building Blocks of the Intranet

Grisby and associate Kathleen Jackson, an Information Resource Management Specialist for USDA, began work on the project in September 1997. "Almost immediately, we were productive with the suite of Information Builders Web tools," notes Jackson. "Looking back, we were proficient with these tools within the first two weeks. Our greatest challenge was working with the legacy databases on the National Computer Center's IBM mainframe located in Kansas City."

Using EDA* middleware as the data pipeline and EDA Enterprise Copy Manager to extract and cleanse the data, the existing MVS FOCUS databases were migrated to a Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 database hosted on a DEC Alpha 2100 platform running Windows NT. Local Microsoft Access and Oracle databases were also ported over to the data warehouse via EDA middleware.

Capitalizing on the bundled software within the NT environment, Grisby implemented Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) software to act as the Web server. WebFOCUS is used to dynamically post summaries and abstracts up to Web screens from the data warehouse. Prior to the recent incorporation of Information Builders' WebFOCUS Suite's Managed Reporting Environment (MRE) within the Intranet, Microsoft's Front Page was used for HTML generation. "The product worked well, but we didn't need it after adding WebFOCUS MRE," says Grisby.

Today, WebFOCUS and MRE provide a graphical, user-friendly front-end for comprehensive data analysis via standard reports, parameterized queries, and ad hoc requests. With WebFOCUS MRE, users select Rural Development projects, geographic areas, and time periods, and then retrieve summaries of program funding based on their variables. A screen option also provides drill-down capability to view successively greater levels of detail.

"We have been amazed at how quickly Rural Development staff throughout the nation have become adept at using the system without any training," says Jackson. "Unlike other systems, which required extensive and expensive training, we only have to point users to the URL and monitor the increasing activity.

"We had no major rollout of the system," adds Vasquez. "Its reputation has been spreading quickly over the Web merely by word-of-mouth."

Information Builders' technical representatives, especially Douglas R. Monson, have played an active role in implementing the USDA's Intranet. "Information Builders' entire staff, from the sales folks to technical support personnel, have been enormously helpful and a tremendous asset," says Grisby. "As a beta tester for MRE, the Office of Community Development has also been a valuable resource to Information Builders for helping to improve the MRE software. The cooperative efforts have helped each organization to achieve its project rollout goals."

Attaining Tangible Results

Specifically designed to help top policy makers respond to questions from Congress and budget officials, the system has already delivered dramatic improvements in financial reporting accuracy and timely access to data. Prior to the Intranet, questions such as "What were the Rural Development investments in 1997 for the Mississippi Delta region?" required weeks of laborious data-gathering and analysis, yet yielded obsolete answers with only an 80 percent accuracy factor. Now, similar analysis takes only a few minutes to perform, and the accuracy of the data is as high as 98 percent. More sophisticated analysis, such as comparing investments to census population characteristics for a particular region, which were impossible to perform, are now easy to mine from the database.

The Office of Community Development is pleased to see the days of arduous, digging through piles of printouts for information analysis fading into the past. "We succeeded in creating a system that looks integrated," says Vasquez. "We have created a powerful data warehouse from our existing data stores. We have proven it is possible to achieve virtual system integration at the desktop level without the need for massive system re-engineering."

Paving the Way

With their new system now in place, Vasquez and his team eagerly await the opportunity to demonstrate how well it tracks investments in Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities.

Vasquez emphasizes the value of using the Rural Development system as a model for other legacy data and intranet projects. "Not only have we implemented technology that improves the efficiency of our own operational area, but we have leveraged the power of the Web to empower community leaders to take charge of their own development and rely less on the federal government," says Vasquez. "We know that using technology is an important way for the government to consolidate and reduce administrative costs. We believe this system is a shining example of that vision."

Vasquez foresees a concerted effort within the federal government to integrate existing data across all agencies. In the future, when Congress wants to know how much money has been spent in a particular area of the country during a certain period of time, individual members of Congress will only have to look as far as their own desktop computers for immediate answers.

"Deployment of Web technologies to access legacy systems marks a revolutionary turning point," concludes Vasquez. "Solutions such as this system are transforming the government's ability to effectively manage itself."

(*Note: EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)