County staff unveil new justice-system data dashboards; presentation highlights program outcomes, data limits

Marathon County officials presented a new justice-system data project that pulls 2024 program data from a vendor case-management system and displays it in Power BI dashboards and regular reports for staff and the public. The presentation described efforts to standardize hundreds of event codes, build repeatable reports, and produce weekly case-manager dashboards intended to improve transparency and management of diversion, treatment and supervision programs.

County Administrator Lance said the project is intended to help the county answer policy questions about program performance and to give the public clearer information about “how much do we do, how well do we do it, and is anyone better off.” Michael Schultz, Marathon County Data Officer, and Laura Yari, Justice Systems Coordinator, described the technical work: reducing inconsistent coding, building data-cleaning rules and automating Power BI reports that refresh from the vendor system (1Solution).

“Now that we're able to pull information through lots and lots of coding, that black box that you see there is just pages and pages of me manually programming what we need to pull out of these systems,” Michael Schultz said, explaining the manual ETL and reporting…