OFFENDER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OVERVIEW

The Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) partnered with Quantam Solutions for Project Control Office (PCO) services coupled with business and technical staffing to manage the modernization of applications that track offenders in Michigan correctional facilities. MDOC and Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) started the modernization of MDOC information technology (IT) systems by eliminating some legacy applications and launching the Offender Management System (OMS). The Corrections Management Information System (CMIS) legacy mainframe system was sunset in the first project phase. Next, MDOC’s time computation system was replaced providing enhanced flexibility and support in the face of ever-changing criminal laws at both the State and federal level. The project’s updated hardware and software provides MDOC substantial savings and long term benefits. Furthermore, the MDOC user community experiences vastly expanded levels of control in monitoring offenders, creating improved organizational efficiencies.

THE BUSINESS

The Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) consists of twenty-two (22) correctional facilities with a statewide prison population of more than 40,000 inmates and 60,000 people on parole. The complexity of MDOC’s application cannot be understated as MDOC is charged with tracking the entire lifecycle of an offender from sentencing to parole. Offender monitoring does not end with parole as recidivism rates require MDOC to monitor offenders for many years. Ultimately, MDOC’s purpose is to safely house and monitor in Michigan’s prison system all adults and juveniles sentenced as adults and convicted of offenses. Convicted offenders serving time in prison can be paroled, if eligible, upon meeting predefined criteria. MDOC must also monitor parolees through its IT applications.

PRODUCING MODERN APPLICATIONS

The business of incarcerating offenders is logistically complex as well as challenging from an IT system standpoint. MDOC faced challenges with the development, maintenance, and control of its existing systems, highlighting the need to procure modern applications. For an extended period of time, MDOC struggled to make the most of its aging infrastructures used for offender management, time computation, victim notification, tracking of offender mental health services, and much more. MDOC’s legacy CMIS was distributed across poorly integrated mainframes and client-server applications, which were expensive and difficult to maintain. MDOC needed to transition to a new system, while also maintaining active interfaces to other MDOC systems until the entirety of the transformation project was complete. Moreover, tracking offenders from intake through release is vital not only to MDOC, but also for victims’ families, whose lawful right it is to be notified when an offender’s incarceration status changes. Frequently law enforcement agencies and judges must also be informed when particular offenders are being released. Thus, offender sentence calculations must be processed correctly because sentence calculations, if computed incorrectly, could result in releasing an offender prior to the completion of his or her sentence. This highlighted an additional and urgent need to replace an aging and increasingly inefficient MDOC time computation system, which was used for calculating sentences for its 40,000 inmates as well as 60,000 people on parole.

QUANTAM’S PART

Quantam’s involvement with the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) began back in 2013. The State of Michigan came to Quantam wanting to partner for PCO services coupled with business and technical staffing to manage the project. Since then, Quantam has placed quite a few highly skilled team members on the project, ranging from business analysts and program analysts to portfolio managers and system architects. Having such a broad team in place enabled Quantam to easily make a positive impact on the project’s success, and in only 14 months. Although there is still work to be done at the MDOC, Quantam being able to ensure the quick and efficient completion of this part of the process has been extremely beneficial to the MDOC. 

ACTION

In 2012, the State of Michigan conducted extensive technology research, meeting with a number of IT vendors to determine the best strategy for replacing the existing mainframe. MDOC ultimately selected the Microsoft Dynamics CRM® platform using .NET plugins and Microsoft SQL Server as the backend product. In 2013, MDOC recognized the need to partner with Quantam for expertise in managing the design and implementation of the new system. Quantam and MDOC began implementing its Offender Management System (OMS) with the first modernization phase being time computation. MDOC turned to InRule®, software that enables management of logic and rules that dictate the time left in an offender’s sentence, to manage time computation. Using InRule®, Quantam assisted MDOC in defining and creating all time computation system rules.

TIME COMPUTATION

The entire process, from software delivery, to deployment, to completion of business rule authoring was accomplished in fourteen (14) months. Quantam helped oversee not only business rule definition, but also provided project control services ensuring the time computation system was implemented on time. Quantam, in collaboration with DTMB, assessed that developing and deploying the business rule management system for time computation would be the most complicated and highest project risk. Using the existing MDOC mainframe, a programming team was tasked with manually writing and calculating the time computation rules and logic. Time computation rules had to be modified at least once each year to align with evolving policies and legislation, adding to implementation complexities. The reality that a large team was needed to manually confirm and compute time computation left MDOC vulnerable to miscalculations and errors; however, Quantam’s Project Control Office (PCO) managed the beginning portions of the project to completion with minimal issues. The entire time computation system implementation was done with speed and agility in mind, allowing MDOC to significantly reduce the programming effort.

FINAL PHASE

The next phase focused on integrating critical functionality from the legacy system, the Offender Management Network Information (OMNI) System to the new OMS system. In addition, Quantam managed the active interfaces between other MDOC systems, and other legacy systems that transmitted data from OMNI to OMS. Quantam helped MDOC move functionality via Quantam’s highly skilled programmers, business analysts, and system architects who were all managed by Quantam project and program managers. The primary integration interface between the new OMS application and OMNI is an application called SSIS, which was also used as the avenue for data conversion. Quantam programmers worked hand in hand with DTMB programmers to deploy SSIS to integrate, replicate, and migrate data from both MDOC’s cloud-based and on premise applications. In 2015, Quantam continued to lead the effort to complete the project by ensuring all remaining legacy functionality was incorporated into the new application using an agile design, development, and implementation approach. The continuing effort includes retirement of additional legacy systems and decommissioning of servers with the goal of increasing costs savings. Quantam also continues to staff developers responsible for SCRIBE integration maintenance and continuous improvement. Lastly, Quantam is aiming to procure and utilize automated testing tools for unit, regression, and user acceptance testing test cases to streamline ongoing maintenance. These tools will ensure coding standards are followed, thus cutting the need for time consuming reviews and increasing the sophistication of MDOC’s software testing processes in alignment with the State of Michigan’s System Engineering Methodology (SEM).

THE RESULTS

While the project remains in-progress, there have been benefits since OMS’s initial functionality was deployed in August 2014. By October 2014, the State of Michigan quickly saved $345,000, an early gain realized during the transition to the new systems. Changes and updates to the OMS application rules can now be completed immediately, reducing the time to package software for release. In addition, redeploy activities and IP mappings are no longer necessary using the new system. Centralization reduces risks and, therefore, provides improved security for MDOC. OMS and its interface with OMNI are real-time so there is a dramatic improvement in data accuracy and immediacy. Finally, because OMS is a single, consolidated database, it eliminates the need for dual system data reconciliation between it and the interfaced solutions, eliminating dual data entry, plus it contains complete, consistent, and accurate data that allows for ad hoc research capabilities.

SIMPLIFIED SYSTEMS

The benefits of the time computation system continue to be innumerable. The new system greatly simplifies the time computation processes as Legislatures continually add new laws, while often times not retracting prior laws. The new system’s advantage is programmers can quickly code rules based off all the varying laws. MDOC can remove laws or if a law gets reformed, the organization can quickly adapt to a new law and provide the Legislature and MDOC management an idea of the new laws impact. For instance, Michigan has an automatic two-year penalty for gun possession. If the Legislature decides to raise that to a three-year penalty, or reduce it to a six-month penalty, MDOC can quickly run all the rules against their current population to find out what kind of an impact the change will have on the current offender population. Based on that data, policymakers can make more informed business decisions. Moving from the old mainframe to modern technology also saved MDOC about $1 million per year in both hard and soft costs. The newer server environments and the total architecture cost, is much less than MDOC was paying previously with the mainframe. Previously, MDOC had instances of time computation functionality coded incorrectly in the mainframe. Staff had to manually calculate things to get to the right calculation. Because it took so much time to modify the system, laws were changing quicker than MDOC could modify code, test, and deploy to production. This problem is now a thing of the past. In the end, time computation became one of the most successful and the least risky aspects of the early part of the project and this was due both to the procured technology and the Quantam partnership. The new system tracks an offender’s entire lifecycle and helps MDOC process 12,000 transactions each day. Both the offender and the victim also have access to time computation information in a much more efficient manner.

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