Central Access to Recovery Data System (CARDS) Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of Administration. Category: Open Government Initiatives

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1 Central Access to Recovery Data System (CARDS) Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of Administration Category: Open Government Initiatives 1

2 B. Executive Summary In the wake of the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, Pennsylvania s Office of Administration (OA) hosted a series of interagency workgroups to address the various compliance requirements imposed under the Act. In the space of just a few months, it established CARDS (Central Access to Recovery Data System) to give commonwealth agencies a common and intuitive tool to share and receive key information on the status of Pennsylvania s Recovery Act implementation, fulfill compliance activities for the federal government, and provide information to the general public. As staff combed through the compliance requirements contained within the Recovery Act, it quickly became clear that no existing system could generate the newly mandated reports. The system that would ultimately become CARDS was initially conceived of as using a data-driven architecture that would capture a small amount of information from agency staff, combine it with financial data from our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and then create the quarterly Section 1512 reports with as little manual intervention as possible. Within a matter of weeks, state executives began to define a need for additional enhancements to support their implementation of the Recovery Act, such as a central calendar to track ARRA-related legislative hearings, press events, and compliance deadlines; as well as weekly and monthly summaries of spending to-date for the public. Soon, the system was also being asked to create county-level reports on the geographical distribution of Recovery Act funds. The system was also established to set up auto-feeds to the public facing Pennsylvania Recovery website ( The most recent expansion of CARDS enabled the system to support the Pennsylvania Accountability Office s ARRA performance measurement initiative, through which citizens are being kept apprised of Recovery Act program outcomes. As the Commonwealth s implementation of Recovery Act programs has matured, senior officials have recognized the power of CARDS to provide them with the information they need in order to manage the overall initiative. This led to the development of an internal management dashboard, which provides real-time information on employment and spending trends, at both an agency and program level. Similarly, as the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) expanded the scope and complexity of the Recovery Act s quarterly reporting process, staff identified ways to use CARDS functionality to build data quality dashboards to dramatically reduce the burden of preparing and vetting Section 1512 reports. CARDS intuitive design, flexibility and scalability has become a model for other enterprise initiatives in the commonwealth that need to be developed quickly and require coordination of data across multiple sources. 2

3 C. Description of the business problem and solution, including length of time in operation. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 imposed numerous and complex compliance requirements, including the submission of quarterly reports (Section 1512) to the federal government. Even after it was signed into law in February 2009, specific guidance on complying with these requirements was both evolving and forthcoming. The product set selected for CARDS was a toolset the commonwealth had already purchased and installed: Microsoft Sharepoint, SQLServer and BizTalk and SAP BusinessObjects. Because we wanted to maintain the solution in house, we elected not to procure a specific ARRA solution from a vendor. From the first days of the project, the commonwealth determined that the system that would ultimately become CARDS must satisfy the following overarching requirements. The tools selected to fulfill each requirement appear in parentheses: Provide access to detailed financial records of ARRA-related payments, including information on the identity and location of the commonwealth s ARRA vendors (SAP ERP) Gather information from various agency-controlled systems by providing the ability for state agencies to submit records through conventional, off-the-shelf web services, and then store this information centrally, in conjunction with the appropriate SAP records (Microsoft BizTalk, SQL Server) Provide management access to all relevant data, and enable manual management and changes (Microsoft SharePoint) Convert relevant records to an XML format in order to provide current information on ARRA programs to the general public through the state s Recovery Act website ( and also to generate the commonwealth s Section 1512 reports for submission to (BizTalk) Create reports to provide the general public with current and accurate information on ARRA spending, and on the impact of these programs on a county-by-county basis; to provide internal managers with status reports on ARRA initiatives, and with tools to enable them to assess and improve the quality of the data that will be incorporated in the commonwealth s Section 1512 reports (SAP Business Objects) The challenges to building CARDS included rapid development, complexity of business rules, ensuring all data went through a data quality review process and monitoring the data collection and data transfer across multiple agencies in the commonwealth. The team had relatively little time to actually build and deploy. Final specifications for the Section 1512 report were provided in mid-august 2009 and the system needed to 3

4 be operational by September so that it could be released to agencies for their data collection efforts. The first Section 1512 report was due to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget on October 10, After the system was built in September, the Office of Administration trained over 200 agency staff and then coordinated data gathering with 20 different agencies during the month. Our next major challenge was defining all of the business rules which would be used to extract data from the commonwealth s ERP system to feed CARDS. These rules needed to comply with the evolving OMB requirements for Section 1512 as well as internal procedures for managing accounting. This was an extremely time-consuming process. Staff from the Office of the Budget were enlisted to review every single expenditure that came over with a key checklist and exception reports were created to flag any expenditures which should not be brought over. Data quality was another strong point of emphasis. Agency staff received training in what to look for when they were reviewing their Section 1512 reports. In addition, an approval function was built into the system so that agencies were vested in the process of ensuring that their data was accurate prior to sending the reports to OMB. The goal was to get the reports completed on time and with as few errors as possible. The project was extremely fast-paced and in addition to the Section 1512 requirements, other entities were also requesting data and reports. By intentionally designing the system with the ability to scale for downstream requirements, the team was able to evolve the system fairly quickly to address these new needs. To overcome the challenge of coordinating data collection across 20 agencies in the commonwealth, a war room was established with people that could field agency questions. The war room was open for the month of October until the first report was submitted to OMB. CARDS is also used to monitor which agencies still owed information, and escalation procedures were established for who to call within an agency if they did not respond in a timely manner. All this hard work continues to pay off, as Pennsylvania has been able to submit its Section 1512 reports to OMB early every quarter. The project was approved while the ARRA legislation was still working its way through Congress in February and teams were formally launched later that month. The system became operational in September 2009 for the first submission of 1512 reports sent to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in October D. Significance: How did the project improve the operation of government? Note any new, innovative approach to the business need. The CARDS approach is innovative because of its accessibility, utility for multiple audiences, low maintenance costs, and most importantly, comprehensiveness. 4

5 CARDS is extremely user-friendly; training sessions rarely last a full hour, even though most of the system s users have decidedly non-technical and non-financial backgrounds. The system s calendaring function resembles Microsoft Outlook in many ways, and key reference documents are stored and organized in CARDS in a logical and accessible web-style fashion. One of the many benefits of the system is that its flexibility has allowed staff to make modifications to CARDS organization and interface in response to user requests quickly, and without difficulty. We essentially took the fairly complex Section 1512 requirements and created a system for agencies that do not deal with Section 1512 compliance on a regular basis. One particular innovation of CARDS is that the commonwealth s ARRA subrecipients now have a webpage they can visit that provides them with information on all ARRA funding they have received from the commonwealth. Many school districts, for instance, have already received funds through six different ARRA programs (with more potentially to come). Depending on how school districts seek these funds and organize their operations, the relevant grant paperwork may not be centralized within a single office. The CARDS system enables districts business professionals to see the full range of their ARRA funding in a single location. This approach is customer servicefriendly, and also helps the commonwealth assure that the data it captures from its subrecipients and vendors is accurate. The CARDS architecture is simple with a web-front end, a middleware engine, a database backend and a reporting engine. We used commercial, off-the-shelf products for all layers and are proud to say that we are maintaining all solution components with in-house staff. OA did hire two contractors for a short period of time to help supplement the team, but we set out on this initiative with the goal of maintaining this solution ourselves. Finally, CARDS comprehensiveness is unusual certainly for a system that was constructed so rapidly. As discussed elsewhere, the tool includes initiative calendars, a data library and key reference materials, internal management reports, data quality dashboards, and the data that supports Pennsylvania s performance measurement and Section 1512 reports. CARDS also feeds the state s Recovery Act website with information on the status of various ARRA-funded projects, and is used to generate county-level profiles for the general public. The web-based front-end which enables the state s subrecipients to review their ARRA funding is also based in CARDS. By constructing the system this way, the commonwealth was able to fully centralize its Section 1512 compliance activities, relieving its agencies, subrecipients, and vendors of much of the compliance burden, and ensuring a much higher degree of data quality. 5

6 E. Benefit of the Project: What does the organization give back to the public for the resources invested in IT projects? Quantitative and qualitative performance measurements are appropriate here. CARDS is an extremely simple and intuitive tool to monitor the status of Recovery Actfunded initiatives, collect and distribute performance measurement data, capture compliance data from grantees, and build reports for the federal government and the general public. Staff from the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board have been most complimentary during demonstrations of the system; the CARDS approach has also been well-received during presentations to the Association of Government Accountants and the Pennsylvania State Association of County Auditors. By definition, CARDS is a system that was built to provide greater insight and accountability into how the commonwealth is spending ARRA dollars. Prior to CARDS, all financial data was maintained within an ERP system which was used primarily by accounting staff, purchasing agents and fiscal personnel. Many business or program personnel have challenges using our ERP system because they do not access the system regularly. With CARDS, many executive and program staff received access to financial information that was formatted in an intuitive manner and had many reports they could pull rapidly. As a result of the commonwealth s decision to centralize all ARRA reporting into one solution, several agencies elected not to build their own IT systems to manage their Section 1512 reporting process. The commonwealth also centralized the responsibility of becoming very familiar with the Section 1512 requirements so that agencies did not need to review all of the paperwork. Now that CARDS has been implemented, there is a larger audience of individuals that have familiarity with the data within the ERP system. We provided more access to financial information to the public on how ARRA dollars are being spent. We have established a strong foundation from which to expand our financial transparency initiatives. 6