Case Studies

The Challenge

As is the case for all federal agencies, HHS is required to report their Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request activities annually to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Staff members faced with this responsibility were met with the following challenges:

• The annual report must comply with a specific format published by the DOJ. This specification is complex and there were no tools available to ensure compliance to the specification.
• Each division builds their report independently. There were no tools in place to merge reports to produce one for the entire enterprise.
• Reports were generated using general-purpose office productive tools such as Word and Excel. These tools did not provide mechanisms that would the specific workflows required to produces the reports.

The Solution

The Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA) brought in CTAC to address these challenges. In response, CTAC developed FITS to address FOIA annual reporting needs for HHS. FITS helps by providing the following:

• An easy to use collection of web forms that significantly simplify the data collection process.
• Role-based workflow with status checks and email alerts so that users can quickly see where they are in the complex process.
• Comprehensive reports at both the division level and for the entire organization, include output to Microsoft Word and DOJ’s Extensible Markup Language/National Information Exchange Model Information Exchange Package Documentation format.
• Availability anytime to authorized users any place a high-speed internet connection is available.

CTAC utilized the 2008 Guidelines for Agency Preparation of Annual FOIA Reports, the DOJ supplied excel data collection spreadsheet, as well as early drafts of the DOJ Annual reports as reference documents in the design of FITS.

Technology Overview

FITS is built on a Ruby on Rails/MySQL distributed infrastructure.

It utilizes the well known Model-View-Controller architecture to separate the data representing a given annual report, from its web page display, via the business logic contained in the controllers layer. The controllers are built as a custom Rails framework hosted in the Passenger module on one or more Apache web servers. Rails, is a Domain Specific Language, constructed from the Ruby programming language, which fluidly facilitates construction of applications based on the Model-View-Controller architecture in a web environment. The Annual Reporting data is persisted to a MySQL database datastore, via the controller logic.