ARRADash

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Dashboard

Solutions: Interactive Dashboard, Portal, Rich Internet Application
Vertical: Government

The National Park Service Budget Office desired an internal graphical reporting system for projects funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This system, or dashboard, would enable them to track ongoing projects for the purposes of management oversight and performance reporting.

The dashboard would need to collect data from multiple sources and be able to perform some calculations so that it could provide up-to-date status tracking, financial tracking, and performance reporting. The data would be displayed in summary graphs for the various projects and be able to provide reports based on user selected criteria which could be downloaded from the system.

The dashboard’s design needed to reflect the branding of other National Park Service systems and sites. Efficient use of the system depended on clean organization of the various tools and information.

Fig Leaf Software implemented the backend data gathering and logical operations of the dashboard in ColdFusion. ColdFusion allowed us to schedule webservice calls to retrieve the data from outside sources which included:

The Project Management Information System (PMIS)
The Planning, Environment, and Public Comment System (PEPC)
The Park Transportation Allocation Tracking System (PTATS)
DSC MS Project Database

Some of these needed to be scheduled for regular (hourly) updates, while others were updated on schedules determined by when the data would be expected to be fresh. If the data gathering for any reason failed to happen, the system would retain the data it had and send out a notification to those in charge of monitoring it so that the cause could be determined and quickly fixed.

Adobe Flex was used for the graphical display of the data provided by the backend. Fig Leaf worked with the team at DOI to design a compact, interactive, and easy to use layout for the system as a whole and each individual page. The navigation was streamlined, functionality that permitted views that could be expanded and collapsed were designed, and interactive, colorful graphics were used to aid in appeal and readability. With Adobe Flex we took advantage of it's Flex Remoting capabilities to connect to the ColdFusion components that provided data to be displayed. Flex Remoting was also very useful in search based operations where users would enter specific criteria to be reported on.

The National Park Service Budget Office was responsible for creating a quarterly report, the reporting tools within the ARRA Dash helped create this report and made it easier for the Office to assemble. Most of the reporting was dynamic enough to allow users to generate a view on both aggregate and project specific levels. In most cases users could filter based on the Region, Park, Project type, and Project status. Reports on individual projects generated by the basic search function allowed users to export a PDF of the project details which included the project description, status, and performance data. While the Project Advanced Search Report included filtering by an even wider range of metrics and allowed user selection of which fields to be included for the Excel export.

The ARRA Dash system was consulted and the reporting used on a daily basis by the Budget Office to track the many projects that were a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. The new system provided rich functionality and easy access to the information in order to manage these projects effectively.