Top-Down Reporting

In contrast to Nygard, CRC Health Group has taken more of a top-down approach to its mobile BI deployment, in part because its executives and managers are the ones on the road. The clinicians who diagnose and treat depression, substance abuse and troubled youth stay close to the treatment centers in 160 locations across the country.

Mobile delivery was an integral part of a first-time BI and performance management deployment at CRC. After reviewing several products throughout 2006, CRC selected the Cognos 8 platform and its Go!Mobile module in January 2007.

"We've developed a data mart and a reporting strategy, and at the top of the pyramid is the mobile information," says Jay Ramiodi, vice president and CTO. "We're reporting on key business metrics for the company, such as whether or not key patient assessments are being completed and the acuity of the patients."

"Acuity" is a clinical term for the severity of a given patient's condition, as measured by key indicators including family problems, legal problems, drug use and alcohol use. In some cases, problems across a patient population can roll up into a bigger picture.

"Let's say you're on the road and you see an office that has admitted four or five patients with a high level of acuity around employment problems," says Ramiodi. "If the primary issue is drug or alcohol abuse but we can see that it's being caused because some plant that just laid off a bunch of people, we can quickly change our treatment approach in response to those indicators."

From an administrative perspective, patient-level information rolls up alongside financial and operational indicators. These reports and metrics are consumed at various levels. CRC's chief medical officer might look at network-wide trends to come up with treatment and training programs. Clinical compliance staff ensure that government- and internal-standards around timely assessments and treatment are being met. Area managers look at qualitative measures as well as operational data on numbers of patients and assessments compared to budget. The clinical supervisors who oversee individual facilities also look at a mix of qualitative and productivity measures.

After developing the data mart and measures in the first half of 2007, CRC moved on to refining reports to be delivered both through the Web and through Go!Mobile. "Go!Mobile was crucial to us because we had already selected RIM and the Blackberry as our mobile computing platform," says Ramiodi, "The Cognos platform lets us publish to the Web and publish to Go!Mobile without changing code."

The clinical supervisors, QA staff and regional managers who oversee multiple facilities are among the most mobile of CRC's executives, and Ramiodi says they're emerging as the biggest consumers of reports via Go!Mobile.

"These people are relying more and more on their Blackberries and they're not taking their laptops along, so this wasn't just about delivering time-sensitive information; Blackberries are now the mobile information platform," he explains.

As for the depth of reporting, Ramiodi says CRC is focused on delivering the right KPIs rather than every imaginable statistic. "In most businesses, people get too much data, so the important information gets lost," he says. "Our goal is to communicate with behavioralists, who are right-brain people, and not burry them with too much data."

Preparing for Emergencies

The mobile BI application at NASA's famed Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, is not quite off the ground. The agency's Launch Processing Directorate, which is responsible for launching the Space Shuttle, has been using Information Builders' WebFocus for nearly ten years. The BI platform is the foundation for five core applications: a travel application for tacking business travel, an IT purchase approval app, a budgeting and forecasting app, an auditing app and an emergency notification application. The last of these became the first priority for mobile delivery, and with good reason.

The Emergency Notification App came about in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, explains Ron Phelps, project manager in the Shuttle Project Control Office. "In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, managers in the Michoud Assembly Facility [in Louisianna] and Stennis Center [in Mississippi] had difficulty tracking down employees, finding out if they needed help and estimating how quickly they could get back to work," Phelps explains. "To preclude that from happening at the Kennedy Space Center, we developed an application to provide notification information to managers so we can clear the Center but have up-to-date contact information for our employees."

Many Launch Directorate managers were already equipped with Blackberries, so when Information Builders introduced the WebFocus Mobile Favorites add-on module late last year, it was natural to consider mobile reporting applications. And given that hurricanes warnings have forced evacuations of the Kennedy Space Center on a number of occasions, the emergency notification app was an obvious first choice; Phelps and his team focused on a few key reports.

"One of the parameterized reports let you can select a mail code for a particular organization, and it will give you the data for all the personnel within that group," Phelps explains. "Within 24 hours prior to clearing the center, the plan is to produce final reports that they can download and have available on their mobile device."

Some 25 to 30 managers are to gain mobile access to these reports so they can track some 400 employees in the Launch Directorate. Unfortunately, changing security requirements have delayed Phelp's beta project. After initial VPN sign-in and encryption requirements had been resolved, the Launch Directorate's IT team implemented the Kerberos authentication protocol, a development that has presented another technical hurdle to signing into central servers from the mobile browsers currently supported by RIM.

"We're working with Information Builders to try to figure out that the best solution will be," says Phelps. "I chose emergency notification because it's one of our simpler applications and we wanted to test it out and learn the right way to do it before trying it on something more complicated."

Once the latest security wrinkles are resolved, Phelps guesses that the travel tracking application might be the next to be mobilized so managers who are themselves on the road can keep track of subordinates and colleagues who are travelling.