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ODGA and the Department of Forensic Science Case Statistic Dashboards

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

About the Office of Data Governance and Analytics (ODGA)  

The ODGA partners with Commonwealth agencies and public institutions to maximize the value of Commonwealth data through strategic governance, secure and appropriate data sharing, and enterprise analytics services informing actionable intelligence. The office is led by the Chief Data Officer for the Commonwealth of Virginia and is made up of a team full of talented professionals.  

What prompted the collaboration of the DFS with the ODGA? 

The Department of Forensic Science hired a contractor to build them a Case Statistics dashboard. This dashboard was left unfinished, and the ODGA stepped in to complete it.  

Project 1:  

The ODGA worked to replicate the calculations underlying the initial dashboard and coded a visualization template to use. The ODGA provided DFS with a data mart to query to drive data driven decisions and an automated dashboard that updates monthly and can now be found on the DFS public facing webpage. The dashboard provides information on case types including forensic biology, trace evidence, digital multimedia evidence, firearms, latent prints, toxicology, drugs, and questioned documents. Each of these case types is represented in 4 key metrics: 

• “The average days in system” which refers to the average time from when evidence is submitted to when the report is issued for the cases completed in the selected timeframe.  
• “Submitted Cases” refers to the number of submitted cases within the selected timeframe. 
• “Completed Cases” refers to the number of cases completed in the selected timeframe. 
• “Current Backlog” refers to the cases available to be worked at the time the data was last updated.  

This Dashboard enhances government transparency and helps DFS leadership to understand where case related backlogs are forming, helping decision-makers allocate the necessary resources to reduce such backlogs.  

Project 2: 

After creating the public dashboard, DFS asked ODGA to create an internal dashboard that would provide more detailed insights into forensic workload statistics. ODGA created a dashboard that tracks cases received, cases completed, and caseload (the backlog of cases) as well as the average number of days the cases remain open in the system. This information can be filtered down to each lab - Central, Eastern, Western, and Northern. This allows leadership to see which labs are performing the most effectively, and where additional resources might be needed.  

Feedback: 

The team at DFS highlighted that in order to see trends in submitted cases using their old system, DFS employees would manually have to enter the data into Excel and create graphs. ODGA was able to automate this, in turn saving DFS at least 3 hours of time per month. Human error and data entry errors are less of a concern with ODGA’s help. 

See the dashboard here: https://dfs.virginia.gov/about-dfs/case-statistics-dashboard/