Texas Education Agency responds to rule changes 90x faster with IBM ILOG

The Texas public school system has been in existence since 1854, and today is one of the largest public school systems in the United States, with 4.6 million students in 1,200 school districts and 320,000 school staff. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) implements educational programs according to the laws and business rules that are passed down by the Texas legislature and the Texas State Board of Education.

The legislature meets every two years, and the Board of Education meets more frequently, which means that the rules change quite often. This presents a challenge to programs which the agency manages, such as the Teacher Certification Program.

The Teacher Certification Program used to be a separate agency—the State Board of Educator Certification Agency—and later became part of the TEA. It manages teacher credentialing, serving as a customer relationship management system for educator certification. The program keeps track of teacher training and certificates, and administrates the process by which educators take tests and receive their certifications.

Responding to fast changing regulatory environment

“Because of the changing regulatory climate for teachers, we have to be very responsive in deploying the rule changes into our applications,” says Rick Goldgar, chief technology officer and deputy chief information officer for the Texas Education Agency. “Teachers need to know what they have to do in order to be certified. Sometimes this involves changing their curriculum when they are still studying to become teachers, so they need to have clear guidance as soon as a new regulation is passed.”

However, the TEA has a legacy of many years of rules programmed into the teacher certification application. There are actually three applications that were developed separately. A legacy application was written by the State Board of Educator Certification Agency before it became part of the TEA. An enhancement of that application was written as a separate application and interfaced with the legacy code. And a third separate piece was the reporting application.

The rules governing teacher certification were buried within thousands of lines of C#, ASP, Java™, XML and SQL programming, and it literally took months to find the right code in order to change it. “It was not uncommon for us to take six months to find the right code and issue the revised guideline,” says Goldgar. “Sometimes we would make changes in the application just before the new rule went into effect, which didn’t give the teacher a lot of time to plan.”

Easy-to-maintain business rule management system

TEA needed to segregate the business rules from the application to make them easier to maintain. “We wanted to formalize the rules in business language that subject matter experts—our customers—could understand and help maintain,” says Goldgar. “In addition, we had to minimize the number of steps required to go from a change in legislation to its implementation.”

The TEA looked at several choices for managing their business rules, including some open source choices, and selected IBM® WebSphere® ILOG® JRules Business Rule Management System (BRMS). “We undertook a project of Business Process Management using the JRules BRMS, which involved examining the way we were doing our current business and looking for ways to make it better,” says Goldgar. “Since the business rules were driving our business, we had to come to a common understanding of what the business rules were.”

The initiative consisted of several steps. Goldgar’s team had to understand the context for a business rule, what it is used for and how to construct one. The rules had to be made rigorous. There could be only one way to interpret the rule. The team had to segregate the rules into the JRules BRMS, so that there would be one place for them to be managed. Finding common rules patterns enabled the team to re-use those patterns many times to simplify maintenance. In addition, the team had to represent the rules in common business language which would empower subject matter experts to maintain the rules.

A magnitude faster implementation of new rules

Business rules exist within a domain which defines their context. They use a formal conditional syntax which includes an antecedent and consequence. The antecedent is an “if-then” clause and the consequent has one of multiple values. Words such as “educator” and “student” have specific meanings.

“We have what looks like English in JRules and it’s all in one place,” says Goldgar. “If a person wants to find out whether an individual is qualified to get a certification for teaching gifted and talented students, they invoke whatever rules relate to that. And the place they go to look them up is in the WebSphere Rule Team Server where they are maintained in plain English instead of being embedded in a bunch of Java or C# code.”

The difference is dramatic. “Changing the rules used to take up to six months but with ILOG it takes days,” says Goldgar. “Overall, we’re spending much less time on maintenance.”

Building a service oriented architecture

TEA is using a service oriented architecture (SOA) to deploy the JRules Rule Execution Server with IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM WebSphere Business Process Modeler and IBM WebSphere Process Server.

“Over time TEA is shortening development cycles and lowering costs, doing more with less by using a component based architecture to refactor old systems and develop new systems,” says Goldgar. “Tools like the JRules BRMS and other WebSphere products allow us to go quickly and directly from formalized business needs to deployment.”

“SOA allows us to disintegrate a monolithic application to a set of services that are working on the WebSphere backbone. The rules interface easily using JRules on that backbone.”

With IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules BRMS, Business Process Management and the IBM set of tools for developing a service oriented architecture, TEA has a new method for dealing with changes in the regulatory environment. “We’re working smarter because our customers get what they want directly,” says Goldgar. “IBM gives us the tools to go to simple English business rules in JRules that implements changes the customer wants. That’s a huge benefit to the teachers who use the system because it’s more agile and responsive to their needs.”

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For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: ibm.com/software/websphere/products/business-rule-management

For information on Texas Education Agency, visit: www.tea.state.tx.us/

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