The State of Ohio’s data platform team, in partnership with management and advisory services firm Avaap, supports dozens of state governmental agencies, with thousands of different data sources. Each agency acts as an isolated secure ecosystem, with skill sets, use cases, data sources, and infrastructure that vary widely between agencies. To support this decentralized organizational structure, Avaap recommended providing agencies with a common data platform that was easy-to-use and could support any data source and infrastructure environment—on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud. The State’s data platform team enabled each agency to use StreamSets Data Collector to build data pipelines.
After years of using StreamSets for important cross-state projects like tracking behavioral attributes that led to infant mortality, identifying duplicate payments to contractors (which led the State to recoup $1M in excess payments), and tracking how people are using unemployment benefits, the team was ready when called on to support the health department in a time of crisis.
“With StreamSets we can easily take and use any file format [for the COVID pipeline]. When an agency wants to switch endpoints, they don’t have to redo the whole pipeline. All they have to do is change the origin.”
- Sagar Mangam, Avaap for State of Ohio
Avaap and the data platform team were contacted to take over building the COVID dashboard. With agencies already enabled to use StreamSets to build data pipelines, the hundreds of different data sources across 88 Ohio counties, in formats from databases to spreadsheets, were easy to ingest for transformation into a cohesive Tableau dashboard. “For the COVID pipeline, not all counties could give us standardized data. With StreamSets we can easily take and use any file format,” said Sagar Mangam of Avaap, for the State of Ohio.
Because StreamSets pipelines are flexible and portable across environments, the team knew that updates to data sources or endpoints would be easy throughout the life of the dashboard. Sagar said, “When an agency wants to switch endpoints, they don’t have to redo the whole pipeline. All they must do is change the origin.”
“For the COVID pipeline, not all counties could give us standardized data. With StreamSets we can easily take and use any file format.”
ABOUT AVAAP
Avaap is an industry-focused technology management and advisory services consulting firm. They serve as overall Managed Services provider, project delivery partner, and as the key partner to drive governance, adoption, and continuous improvement for the InnovateOhio Platfom. By providing integrated and scalable capabilities, they enable state agencies to become more customer-centric and data-driven, delivering on InnovateOhio's vision to better serve Ohioans.