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Visualizing Project-Status Data with netViz - State of Maryland

Tracking the status of an elaborate Y2K-compliance project can be as daunting as the underlying work itself. That's what the State of Maryland discovered when it began a project to make all of the state's data systems Y2K compliant.

The Project - Making a Multitude of Data Systems Y2K Compliant

When Maryland officials began to plan out the Y2K initiative, they realized that co-ordinating and tracking the Y2K compliance work being done across all of the State's information systems was itself an enormous task. State facilities contain a vast number of data repositories, many of which have connections to other systems. Explained team member Lee McPherson, "a single state agency may have separately-stored information about its internal functions such as personnel and payroll, as well as data needed to perform its administrative duties, such as information about welfare recipients and Medicaid. On top of that, data systems within an agency often implicate an enormous number of sub-systems. For example, the Medicaid system includes separate databases containing physician information, claim status, hospital data and beneficiary information. Not only does each database need to be Y2K compliant, but much of the agency information must be compatible with local or federal agency data. Our task was to supervise the Y2K work on each system and to track the compliance of each sub-system it interacts with."

The Challenge - Visualizing and Communicating Daily Project Status

Making all of the data systems Y2K compliant turned out to be only half the battle. "We needed a way get a handle on our progress as the compliance teams worked their way through each of the State's 27 agencies," explained McPherson. As engineers modified and tested each system and sub-system, they entered compliance data in an Access database. "Going over countless rows and columns of data wasn't a good way give us a picture of how we were doing. We needed a way to quickly get a feel for the status of the compliance work as it changed from day to day," said McPherson.

The Solution - netViz

After looking at a variety of conventional graphics and drawing packages, the State chose netViz to graphically display the information in the compliance database. "netViz's powerful database interface was the driving force in our choice," said McPherson. "The tool allows us capture everything in one environment - something that traditional business-drawing packages wouldn't have allowed us to do. We simply linked our Access database to netViz diagrams. Now all we have to do is look at our netViz diagrams to get an up-to-date graphic representation of our project database."

netViz's data-driven graphics also played a major role in the effort. "We set our objects and links to change color depending on their compliance status. If I do a database refresh and see a lot of red in our netViz diagram, I know that more resources need to be devoted to that system. Linking color to compliance status also makes it easy for State officials to get a quick read on how we're doing in any given agency," said McPherson.

Another benefit was netViz's ability to store all of the project information - including inter-agency connections - in a single file. This allows the Y2K engineers to see how failure in one system would affect other, connected systems. The netViz project hierarchy was set up to account for all the different agency types implicated in the process - private, intra-state, inter-state, county/local and federal. This allows state personnel to get a graphical view of the big picture. Explained McPherson. "At the highest level, netViz provides a picture of all state agencies. To access more detail about a particular agency we just double click to drill down. At the subdiagram level we can see what other agencies and agency types interact with that agency. From there we can drill down further to get information about how systems are connected, how many systems there are, the status of compliance and testing, points of contact, and so on. By linking all of these relationships throughout our netViz project, we can maintain data integrity throughout the system. If we modify a record in our compliance database, all we have to do is refresh our netViz project and the change is automatically reflected throughout the entire system."

The bottom line according to McPherson - "overall, netViz's logical hierarchy of diagrams gives us a more complete picture than disparate databases would allow. By using netViz to visualize the Y2K-project data, we've been able to focus our work effort more effectively and we haven't had to waste a lot of time trying to extract useful knowledge from our database."