The policymaking body for California’s courts is seeking information from vendors on how to extract more financial data from queries and flat reports.
In a Request for Information (RFI) issued April 22, the Judicial Council of California (JCC) looks to learn more about data mining software. Questions are due by 5 p.m. Friday, and responses to the RFI are due by 3 p.m. May 12. Among the takeaways:
• The Council’s need comes out of its July 1, 2018, transition to the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal), the state’s accounting, budget cash management and procurement IT system. Previously, JCC had used an Oracle financial system to do accounting, budgeting and procurement. This, JCC said in the RFI, gave it system oversight and the ability to create and customize its own reports — an autonomy that was lost when it moved to FI$Cal. Reports and queries in FI$Cal, JCC said, “are either data dumps, flat reports, or Excel or CSV files,” and financial reports that were compatible with Oracle can’t be used anymore, “resulting in the need for manual formatting and reconciliation of financial data” by budget and accounting staff.
• In the RFI, the agency offered two examples of how its process has changed. Its Budget Services Program Budget Unit creates monthly forecast projections for JCC’s 13 offices, six appellate court districts, the state Supreme Court and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center. Before implementing FI$Cal, staffers could download budget and expenditure data from Oracle Discover to an Excel template, and format the Judicial Branch Monthly Forecast Report via a macro run. Now, however, the report is either done as a flat file or exported in Excel — and the Excel file needs to be manually formatted to resemble the old forecast report.
As another example, JCC said its Branch Accounting and Procurement, Accounting Services unit reconciles every month with the State Controller Office’s “tab run,” which shows financial activity in all funds. Now, that tab run can only be viewed online or as a hardcopy flat file, according to the RFI, and accounting staffers have to review hundreds of pages to locate specific transactions.
• JCC is seeking a tool that will let users extract data “from a range of unstructured data formats such as PDF, TXT, XLS, XLSX, HTML, DOC, and CSV,” which can be used to stand up a searchable, sortable database, and to craft reusable templates and reports. The Council is most interested, according to the RFI, in discovering capabilities that exist in the marketplace, and general costs. Cost estimates, it noted, are for Council planning and information gathering.
“The Judicial Council would use the software to create custom reports from financial data downloaded from FI$Cal,” JCC Public Affairs Analyst Blaine Corren told Techwire via email. He cautioned that the RFI is only to gather information and may not lead to a Request for Proposals.
• Among the agency’s questions about functionality, it asks whether vendor solutions are on-prem or cloud-based; and if the former, what operating system, database or other software requirements are needed, as well as processor, hard disk and RAM requirements. JCC also wants to know about the capability to automate frequently used report formats; graphical reporting features; forecasting tools, file formats of output files generated; and whether a solution provides a user-friendly interface. The Council also asks vendors to describe how their software or solution manages security and the granularity of the controls; whether it supports Role Based Access Controls (RBAC); and whether it integrates with an identity management system or Microsoft Active Directory. For cloud-based software or solutions, JCC is interested to learn whether a particular solution can support multifactor authentication, encryption and at what level; and whether it supports audit trails or logs of all user activity.
