Auditor's Office Launches New Transparency Portal

Driven by a request from Auditor of State Tera Klutz, the newly-enhanced Indiana Transparency Portal (ITP) incorporates advanced analytics tools to make Indiana government more open and transparent for Hoosiers. Since last fall, the Auditor of State (AOS), MPH, and the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) have been working to develop a web portal that provides a meaningful and accessible picture of the state’s financial data. The collaborative effort of bringing the portal to life began in October 2017, when focus groups were invited to provide feedback and input on the development and end product. The focus groups included agency stakeholders, advocacy groups and members of the media. The data is pulled directly from PeopleSoft, the state’s official book of record, which is utilized by each state agency. Auditor Klutz likes to say that it is fiscally responsible to be transparent but, equally as important, being transparent encourages fiscal responsibility. Providing this new information to users is a great step in bringing the State of Indiana’s transparency to the Next Level.

Users are experiencing significant enhancements with the portal’s incorporation of data dashboards. The previous site allowed users to conduct searches related to financial data, but it was not aggregated. The user had to do much of the work to compile and receive a complete picture of trends or comparisons between years. The new use of dashboards provides users with aggregated information, while still allowing them to filter the data in various ways such as; by agency, fund, vendor or fiscal year. Also included in the dashboards is the ability to download the underlying data. These downloads may include the full data source or more specified data sets, depending on what the user is seeking.

ITP remains a work in progress with new information launching in phases over the next several months. If you have ideas or feedback related to the ITP, please email [email protected]

New Data on the Hub: ITP and Census Data Released

To coincide with the launch of the Auditor of the State’s enhanced Indiana Transparency Portal (ITP), new data has been added to the Indiana Data Hub. The new data centers around five primary topics; expenditures, vendors, non-general fund revenue, purchase and travel card, and assets. This availability enables requestors to download the data in bulk from the State’s home for actionable data covering a variety of subject matter areas.

Census data is also now on the Hub courtesy of the Indiana University Business Research Center (IBRC). IBRC's mission is to provide insights and analysis on the populations and economies of Indiana, serving as the State’s representative to the US Census Bureau and producer of Indiana’s state and county population projections. In partnership with MPH, the IBRC team has repackaged and consolidated the Census information they manage. The data provided by the IBRC can provide contextual background related to other publicly-available information and can be helpful to users of the Indiana Data Hub. The population, housing, income and poverty datasets were constructed from databases maintained by the IBRC using multiple sources including the American Community Survey data of the US Census Bureau, based on the five-year estimates that are released annually, and the Population Estimates Branch, which produces single years of age population estimates by state and county. These datasets focus on Indiana-specific geographic areas, from the county level to the census tract. If you have questions about the new data on the Hub, please reach out to us via our contact page.

Thank you

On July 1, MPH celebrated its first birthday. Our year one success would not have been possible without hard work, trust and collaboration from our many partners. We first want to thank TechPoint and its selection committee for naming MPH as a 2018 nominee for Best of Tech in Indiana, Corporate Innovator of the Year. We are very appreciative for the recognition and the opportunity to share the stage with other innovators in the Indiana tech community. We’d also like to thank the many organizations that allowed MPH to share our story of data innovation in Indiana: HIMSS, Health Data Palooza, the Indiana National Guard, Quarles & Brady, and CDAO Government Conference. We enjoyed speaking with and learning from the attendees at these events. There are so many others that have contributed to our success that it is impossible to list everyone. Just know that we appreciate your support and look forward to many great strides in year two.