The Ohio State Treasurer set a goal to be the gold standard in public fiscal transparency early in his career and was determined to make it a reality. After gathering a team of fiscal, legal and technical experts he needed to find a web development company capable of connecting them all together into a single online presence.
Note: Please note that all contents of this case study are pulled from public data and it is not an endorsement from the Treasurers Office of the State of Ohio or of the State Treasurer himself.
How do you publish 4,550,000,000 pieces of financial data to 12 million people in a way they can understand? How do you take one of the most complex accounting systems in the country and find a way to simplify it in a way the average person can understand it? How do you take $550,000,000,000 in transactions and let an average citizen question why the Department of Transportation spent $675 of that at Victoria’s Secret? To say the least it is a complex balance of user interface, data manipulation, and complex programming.
The final website was installed on a custom built hosting platform within the Treasurer’s high security environment that could support 50,000 concurrent searches. A month of load testing was completed to confirm the reliability of the system. The staff at the Treasures Office worked extremely hard to gather data, categorize it for the web and to confirm its validity. A user experience team was brought in to work through the complex search system.
The State Treasurer’s project took the entire State of Ohio for having been ranked 46th in the nation to 1st. Ohio also moved from a D- transparency rating to an A+ rating and has maintained that position since launching the site. The media coverage was incredible with the Treasurer receiving top air time on national news shows such as CNBC as well as huge praise from Ohio based media. The State Treasurer’s Office was also the only government organization to win the Ohio Interactive Awards “Game Changer” award.
Transparency website in the nation
Billion pieces of data
Billion transactions
Game changer award