San Joaquin County (SJC) Case Studies
San Joaquin County (SJC) Case Studies
San Joaquin County (SJC) boasts seven cities (approximately 921,600 total acres) and an array of opportunities for boating, fishing, camping, and history-gathering. Each city, including the unincorporated County areas, offers a way to enjoy California’s nature and culture.
SJC is the 15th largest county in California and the nation’s eighth leading producer of agricultural products. Covering 1,400 square miles, its population is nearly 600,000 people. To better serve its employees, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiencies, SJC partnered with Delegata to leverage web-based technologies that provide an effective Government-to-Employee (G2E) platform and bring additional information and efficiency to support County employees.
County Intranet Portal
With more than 7,000 employees across 30 departments using a variety of computer systems, San Joaquin County had a major integration challenge. Technology needed to play a key role in supporting the delivery of administrative services through easy access to internal business and employee services. Solutions needed to integrate new technologies with previous legacy investments and processes to effectively move SJC toward its eGovernment vision.
SJC partnered with Delegata to establish an eGovernment infrastructure capable of quickly and efficiently deploying applications and data throughout the organization. Delegata combined its knowledge of government services and technology, employing Oracle’s newly released 9iAS Portal, to create SJC’s innovative Intranet portal. The solution required working closely with Oracle to refine and maximize the portal’s ability to meet the County’s needs. Leveraging off-the-shelf capabilities with existing SJC systems and data, Delegata combined our strong information architecture, systems integration and quality assurance expertise to deliver an integrated, sustainable solution.
With the Intranet portal project, SJC made noticeable strides toward full eGovernment implementation with the ability to quickly integrate and distribute applications as needed. Overall collaboration levels were improved, providing employees with quick access to news and business information. The Oracle 9iAS platform also supports improved information management and library capabilities and addresses archive issues. Additionally, the portal provides a unified place for County employees to access information, equipping them with an effective access point for enterprise-wide operations knowledge.
Data Warehouse
With many aging systems supporting the information needs for the county justice system, there were significant problems in trying to obtain information on a required topic, when the data partially resided in multiple systems in use. Management decisions could not be made on which problems could be resolved, where money was not being collected, what services were performing at appropriate levels, and many other factors that would allow the county to function with a more strategic focus.
The Data Warehouse initiative began more as a strategy engagement. Initially, the defined requirements pointed to the need for a reporting database. As the details behind other systems and other areas of concern to the county began to clarify, the solution became a comprehensive data warehouse that did not consolidate most information, but rather provided the means to pull information from multiple systems throughout the county justice application suite, so that required facts could be obtained based on predominant dimensions of data in use within the county organizations. During the initiative, significant connectivity and access problems were resolved, enabling the data warehouse to operate within the defined enterprise architecture. Concurrently, the various factions within the county came to realize and appreciate what the data warehouse provided as an information asset.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
The county business clients were skeptical at first, since their past reporting databases were not reliable and information was not consistent across systems. As demonstrations continued for available data from multiple systems, it was apparent that the data was accurately reflected from each system. The practices had to be put in place to decide which systems should be considered the master data of record and then to implement ways to ensure that other systems utilized this master data.
TECHNICAL BENEFITS
The technical implementation of the Data Warehouse had to resolve significant data sharing issues in the county infrastructure. Following this resolution, the problem related to multiple systems with duplicate data had to be resolved. The data warehouse enabled this interaction through its interactive design to and from each source system. The resolution of the data issues was retained internally, based on the capabilities to map data to and from the multiple systems in question, enabling the county to use the system for much more than originally anticipated.