North Carolina Department of Public Safety

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Correction staff helped to make the system work better

One of the reasons that OPUS has worked well is that staff from the agency's different divisions were assigned to work with MIS to help develop it. "Essentially, we took a number of their people for up to a year," Brinson said. "That was worth its weight in gold." There were three important benefits.

1. Instead of MIS designing the program and asking users whether it met their needs, staff from the field told MIS how they used the information and helpful ways of making it available.
2. These staff advisers who sat down side by side with the computer programmers now have a better appreciation of the programmer's job.
3. The staff advisers help was critical in translating narrative information in the old system in a way that provided the same quality of information in the OPUS format.

It was critical that the system work precisely, especially when it came to areas such as calculating the time an offender had to serve. Staff calculated hundreds and hundreds of release dates comparing their findings to OPUS calculations. The comparisons allowed staff to correct minor errors and test the system's precision. Not until they were satisfied that it was accurate did the system go online.

Management Information Systems