When the City of Lansing went looking for a way to unify its disparate data sources into a usable single source, it found Timextender.
The Growing Pains of a Growing City
Michigan’s capital city, Lansing, was incorporated as a city in 1859, when it had fewer than 3,000 residents, now home to more than 110,000 people, with a diverse economy that includes government service, healthcare, manufacturing and education.
Yet this kind of success and prosperity comes with additional complications. As it tried to keep track of its data, Lansing started to experience challenges related to accessing, combining and leveraging the data it held on its growing population. At their core, these problems were being caused by data on each individual being stored in, and spread over, a number of siloed data sources.
Looking at just criminal records, the city had been using its own local records management system for hosting law enforcement incident data, until it started using the State of Michigan’s Statewide Records Management System (SRMS) for incident reporting, storing the data on Microsoft SQL Servers. Yet historical crime incident data was also stored in the OffenderTrak Corrections Management System, which tracks jail inmate data from intake to release. Meanwhile, yet another system – CAD+911 Dispatch Management – is used for 911 emergency calls and logging new incident data.
Gathering crime data for everyday police work from these disparate data sources into a single location took so much manual work that the city needed a way to automate the integration, modeling and management of that data.
Transforming the city’s utilization of disparate data would require a solution that could provide a single, trusted and complete version of the truth to give law enforcement organizations faster, more accurate insights into data on criminal activity.
24/7 Access to the City’s Data
Police officers rely on data to fight crime and to do so, they require the interface with technology to be simple, easy to understand and fit for purpose. To provide this kind of daily, accessible analysis and insight across multiple sources, the city used Timextender to build and automate the preparation and integration of data and to build a unified data model that could support their requirements.
Regionally focused business analytics consulting firm WIT works closely with its clients to build custom analysis solutions, including with Timextender. With the help of WIT, the city merged its data sources into a single data warehouse and used Timextender’s data modeling to build one unified model for analysis. Since access to this data is vital for day-to-day police operations, the city hosts the entire solution on a Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition using Always On Failover Clustering, so the system stays available around the clock.
This data warehouse is now the foundation from which law enforcement officials search criminal activity data, known addresses, license plate numbers, relatives, criminal history and so forth.
“Using multiple systems requires the ability to understand and navigate both the system being used and the language that accompanies each system. Using Timextender has provided the tool necessary to combine data sources into one consolidated location. Using the Timextender platform to remodel, cleanse, and create a consistent language between systems has made accessing and utilizing data much faster.” – Robert Gerth, Data Analyst, City of Lansing
A Single Solution That’s Better by Design
Implementing Timextender helped improve operational efficiencies, but that was only the start of it. By removing most of the manual data work, often at moments of high stress when speed was vital, Timextender has also saved time and resources by enabling the police to identify crime suspects based on one view of the city’s data from one consolidated location. This has helped the City of Lansing to improve police efficiency and to create a safer environment for all citizens.
Timextender
