Chicago county goes interactive with taxes, fines

Growing demand for public service information prompted one suburban Chicago county to develop the McHenry County Strategy Information Plan (McSIP), a four-year project that will integrate county offices and provide public access to county records.

When the project is completed, residents will be able to call county offices from their telephones or PCs to access information on traffic violations or taxes and pay any fees automatically. County officials chose Visible Analyst Workbench (VAW), a graphic analysis and modeling tool for client/server application development from Visible Systems in Waltham, Mass., to begin the project.

The system compiles all information pertaining to a particular county application and displays it in a flowchart format to enable step-by-step implementation, guiding users through the complexities of applications development quickly and easily.

VAW has helped county planners develop various facets of McSIP, such as land use, integrated justice and finance and county recorder and voter registration.

To train the staff on the new system, county officials began a pilot project focused on streamlining school bus driver certification. Information about the scope, objectives and constraints of the certification process were used to construct a context diagram that provided a view of each major function of the project as if it were a single process.

Organizations, systems and people interacting with each function of the process (external agents and temporal events) were identified and diagrammed to represent the incoming and outgoing information flow affecting each segment of the project. For example, tax payment deadlines are temporal events initiated by the passage of time that would affect the outcome of an application. Therefore, it was necessary to determine and consider how various events influenced not only the process but each subsequent reaction.

External agents in the school bus driver certification project included the drivers, the district doctor performing the physical exams, the state licensing department and the regional school superintendent. Some of the temporal events included course registration date, date of course completion and education board approval notification date. The system displayed each event as a data flow diagram containing a single process. By processing input information, the central data storage area allows events to interact with each other and shows cause-and-effect relationships.

Each process is a minicontext diagram that can be increased or reduced by adding or subtracting events, making the process more fluid and allowing for easy change. Each event must be correctly entered, however, because incorrectly entered or omitted information affects other events and the accuracy of the process. Still, the VAW system encourages precise incremental development with quality-assurance tests and frequent verifications of model correctness.