Oracle Cloud helps Maine make data-backed decisions
The state provides government partners and staff with direct access to data to improve decisions and efficiency with Oracle Analytics Cloud.
“The Oracle Analytics Cloud and Autonomous Database solution enables my entire financial reporting and accounting staff to refocus our efforts from transactional processing functions to trend analysis and much more valued and strategic reviews. Now I can do reporting on the fly.”
Business challenges
Maine was on a mission to modernize the way the state government delivered real-time, data-based decisions across its operations. Maine’s Office of Information Technology needed to increase efficiency and make analytics services more useful for state employees.
The enterprise data services team is responsible for serving up data to state leaders. That data, however, was extracted from systems that were more than 20 years old. The legacy system did not play well with more modern tools, so government partners had to move data into their own tools for analysis. No amount of expertise was able to make the process efficient.
For example, if the legislature wanted information, it could take days or weeks to receive data, which often was retrieved by a single staffer who understood the nuances of the legacy systems.
From our small staff, we have to report on millions of dollars that are going out each quarter, and having the ability to analyze that data, integrate it with supplemental information, and perform QA on it has been incredibly valuable.
Why State of Maine Chose Oracle
After considering several alternatives, the State of Maine decided to migrate from an internal legacy BI system to Oracle Analytics Cloud for its self-service visualization, enterprise scale, and single point of entry to governed data for both new and veteran analytics users. It enables businesspeople to quickly access data and manage their own analysis while providing consistent views of department performance and results.
In addition, the state selected Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse as its upgrade from the on-premises database. The machine learning automations in Autonomous Data Warehouse eliminate administrative overhead in provisioning, tuning, patching, and securing for zero downtime and high performance.
The state viewed the combined Oracle Analytics Cloud and Autonomous Data Warehouse as a high-value IT platform that could blaze a trail for how governments use data, while posing little risk of disrupting civic life.
Results
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabled Maine to consolidate data from multiple sources for a high-performance data warehouse. It made information immediately available in Oracle Analytics Cloud to decision-makers across the state government, enabling them to build their own dashboards without dependence on IT.
Feedback from business partners across the state was enthusiastic. In the controller’s office, monthly expenditure, revenue, and cash reports are now available daily for tens of thousands of individual programs within the state government. Generating the general ledger trial balance was previously a monthly process and is now completed in a matter of seconds.
In the finance office, the system streamlined day-to-day financial operations, including data reconciliation, cash flow planning and budgeting, and federal reporting for the Medicaid program. And because the data warehouse runs completely autonomously, the team saves money on third-party database administration because less human intervention is required.