Telling Stories with Data
by Even Brande
THE THREE GOALS OF RITETRACK
Our purpose for creating RiteTrack in the late 1990s was for our customers to realize the potential of good information management and to have a positive return on their investment. To achieve this, we have maintained three primary goals:
- To make the best possible information system that helps make their employees more efficient by streamlining and automating data entry and processes.
- To create better outcomes for the people that they serve.
- To turn data into information which can help inform decision-making and lead to better outcomes for all stakeholders.
Most, if not all, of our customers realize the first two goals. However, the third goal sometimes becomes more elusive: Turning data into information.
TURNING DATA INTO INFORMATION
As an adjunct professor at the University of Wyoming I teach a graduate-level course in business analytics, and this is a topic that we spend an entire semester discussing. I will attempt here to cram a semester into a few paragraphs:
Data is just individual objects without context. It can be words, numbers, names, geographical locations, lists and more. Information combines multiple pieces of data together to create context. Information in turn becomes something that can help inform us and help us make better decisions.
Let me illustrate this with a simple example:
The odometer in your car shows that you are driving 80 miles per hour. That is data. The sign on the highway indicates that the speed limit is 70 mph. That too is also just data. However, when we combine these two data elements we get information: You are driving over the speed limit.
RiteTrack is no different. A typical implementation tracks thousands of different data points across hundreds of relational data tables on thousands or even millions of records (people, cases, etc.). By themselves this data is still just data. However, when we combine data points together we get information (reports). Even though RiteTrack comes with a number of reports “out of the box,” many customers will also customize reports to their own needs. A few will take this to the next level; and that may include extracting data from RiteTrack which is subsequently analyzed in external tools like spreadsheets, data visualization programs, or even programming languages well adept at data analytics such as R or Python.
BENTON COUNTY ARKANSAS
One of our customers who has done an extraordinary job turning data into information is Benton County, Arkansas[1]. Drew Shover, the chief juvenile probation officer, has taken their RiteTrack reporting to a whole new plane since they first implemented the RiteTrack Juvenile Probation Software in 2019. Each year, he produces an impressive annual report that is largely driven by the information he extracts from RiteTrack.
The 2023 report was an impressive 41-page document loaded with valuable information and insights that would be the envy of any county or state juvenile justice program. The report includes general population demographics, arrest information, intake decisions, petitions, and filing information. Furthermore, the report goes in-depth on all juvenile programs/case types including Family In Need of Service (FINS), Delinquency, Diversion, and Drug Court. It also contains information on screenings and assessments, probation and detention admissions. The information and trends extracted from this report is used in the summary section to produce a vision for the next year and beyond.
Drew has generated many of these reports by extracting the data from RiteTrack into Excel. In Excel he uses pivot tables and pivot charts to analyze the data and to present it in easy-to-understand visualizations. Below is an example of one of these visualizations showing adjudications by offense category of 302 individual youth with 492 charges.
This is just one example of several dozen that are included in the 2023 Benton County report. We applaud Drew and his team for taking RiteTrack to the next level and giving his county great information.
A pivot chart Drew created in excel with data extracted from RiteTrack to analyze adjudications by office category.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
We asked Drew about the impact RiteTrack has had on their operations:
“With data collection, we were able to get over a half million dollars in grants to convert a portion of a Juvenile Detention Center into an alternative to detention, the first state licensed facility in the country to do so, and collaborate with other agencies to build a probation sub-station to make sure the families were best served in their community. It allows people to travel less and not have to go through security to visit probation officers.”
YOUR STORY AND YOUR DATA
This is exactly the type of return on investment that we know RiteTrack can generate for our customers when implemented correctly.
Drew continues:
“When you tell people your staff of 15 had 6547 officer visits and your juvenile court staff heard 3348 court hearings, it opens the door for important discussions. Since implementing RiteTrack, I have been able to keep my staffing at the same level from 2019 to now.”
When we first started implementing RiteTrack for our first customers, we would hear some anxious employees complain that it would bring them added workload. At Handel we have always believed RiteTrack makes the job easier and your staff more efficient.
Drew’s final comment to me sums this up very concisely and better than I could ever do:
“Data is a tool, not a task.”
We encourage customers to reach out to us to learn more about how they can get the most out of their own RiteTrack data. Whether you need juvenile detention software, juvenile probation software, juvenile court software, or all of the above, RiteTrack has a solution that can help you with your information management needs. There are so many valuable insights that can be gained from some power analytics tools available to us. Once you have the data, discovering how to mine your data for information can be a very rewarding experience and one that can help inform better decision making for the future and create better return on investment for your operation/employees, your clients, and your community.
[1] The county seat for Benton County is located in Bentonville, Arkansas, perhaps best known as the home of Walmart. If you have not visited the Walmart Museum there, I highly recommend a visit.
https://www.choctaw.org/