Special Board of Aldermen 7-14-2020 Page 6
As you can see by the shaded areas, at this point they had really just started Ward 3, but the residential
properties in Ward 1 and 2 had been completed.
So another area that we wanted to look at was Cornell's recommendation on developing a long-range
schedule and developing annual inspection goals. So we contracted with Cornell Consultants to create a
management data collection tool, which is called Power BI and that’s the analytic tool that we chose to use.
Cornell Consultants is very knowledgeable, they are actually a Certified Instructor on this tool and they
came in and they helped us put together some internal and external dashboards. What it does is it helps
you visualize your data and share insights across your organization. So Cornell Consultants takes this
Power BI System and it is connected right to our CAMA System and they extract the data to create these
dashboards. It can be updated nightly, we have chosen to do it nightly; it could be 2 or 3 times a day, that
is really up to you. We would like to put the external dashboards on our Website for the use of our
residents while the internal dashboards are really providing management information, things that will help
us create those long-range schedules and goals.
I'll give you an example in just a moment, but one of the other things that it is important to note is our GIS
Team is also working on an updated GIS Viewer, so we are dealing with CDM Smith and they are working
on that. They expected to have that ready by now, but the GIS Team was assisting the EOC during the
COVID and they were working on some important tools for the EOC so we put this aside. They are also
working on a new residential comparable sales tool. This is a tool that we were asked to work on by
residents who were completing abatements and were having trouble looking for comparable sales in our
current system. So we actually expect that within the next month.
But back to the Power BI — this is just an example. And this will be connected, this particular dashboard to
our Website. So what it does is, as you can see, it gives you the number of inspections for all years. So
you are seeing 127,000 up in the left-hand corner of the screen. In the right hand corner you can see there
is a dropdown for activity results, if you click in that dropdown it would give you a bunch of different types of
inspections and you could click on that and you will refresh the data and it will tell you by inspection type,
how many have been conducted and when.
In the middle of the screen you will see an activity date. You can change the dates that you'd like to
search. One of the things that we felt that this might help residents with, is as our full revaluation moves
along, you are going to see these numbers jump because now we are going to be out doing inspections of
all of our properties. So we wanted to give residents the opportunity to see that and kind of track it on their
own on our website. These colored boxes that you see, that’s another way. You could click on the box so
a Measure & List is a type of inspection, you could click on that purple box and it will tell you now in the
upper left-hand corner exactly how many of those 127 inspections were Measures & List or how many were
external only or how many were field reviews. So it is an interesting tool, it’s very interactive, and that’s
one that will be available on our website.
The second tool is the average sales price for homes, both the average and the median sale price by year.
So if you see in the middle of the screen the building style, you could choose the building style, again the
data will refresh and it will show you the information based upon that building. You could change the years
that you are searching, you could change what type of verification you are looking for. So do you want to
look at Deeds, do you want to look at MLS Data, do you want to look at certain neighborhoods within. We
felt that this one tool that may help, again, our residents when they are searching for that abatement
information. Other people that may find this data informative would be real estate appraisers, things of that
sort. So those are two of the tools that will be accessible on the website.
Now | am going to turn it over to Nick Miseirvitch who is going to talk about the BP5 Upgrade. Nick?
Nick Miseirvitch, IT Department
Thank you, Director Kleiner, Madam President, Members of the Board of Aldermen, Members of the Board
of Assessing. Alright so when we started this project, | had to become familiar with both the new system
