Texas Education Agency lives by the rules

An interview with Rick Goldgar, Deputy CIO and Chief Technology Officer about working Smarter with an IBM Business Rule Management System.

Video Transcript

Texas Education Agency
Interviewee: Rick Goldgar, Deputy CIO and Chief Technology Officer
Transcript
2/24/11

Education Agency is the state agency that manages the K-12 public school districts.
The state and the agency lives by rules. That’s the way the way state and public
entities are. And the rules change all the time.

We have a state board that manages the rules for our teachers to get certificates. We
have legislation that has fairly complex rules and there is a fairly complex workflow
process for that. There were issues with how the payments were made for teachers to
get certificates, how their fingerprinting was done and tracked, how the certificates were
maintained and understood historically and the business rules that were constantly
changing for those things.

So if a rule changes for how a teacher is certified, we have to know that rule change
and be able to implement that in the application. Doing that in the way we have done it
in past has been very hard because the rules are embedded inside the code of the
application. It may take weeks to find the rule, months to change the rule and months to
test the change.

So one of the big challenges for the agency was to take historical application,
understand the functionality of it, and do a complete rewrite of that application and the
business logic behind it, the business rules and the workflow behind it to support this
need.

One of the things I look hard at is how to buy technologies that would allow us to do our
job faster, have less steps in translation from what the business users want to the
implemented production system. So we chose to get a Business Rules Management
System that allows us to segregate those rules from the application and thereby much
more quickly implement those rule changes.

We can make that change immediately, see the effect of that change in test, and go to
production quickly. ILOG allows us to manage those in fairly plain English, just like the
business users would look at and use. The less steps we have in translation, the closer
we are to what the customers want, the more alignment we have with the customers
and the quicker we are to production.

What we would like to do in the long run is have our business users maintain those
rules. So there are other business rules engines we could have used, some free, some
other commercial engines, that would allow us to create the rules and segregate them.
But in the long run, TEA’s IT department would still be managing all those rules.

A lot of our current processes and the tools we use are helping us work smarter. Our
customers and our requirements analysts work together directly on how those rules look
and what they mean and how they are implemented. They don’t have to do any coding
to do that typically. That helps us work smarter there because they get what they want
directly.

The WebSphere SOA architecture that allows us to disintegrate the application from
monolithic application, to a set of services that are working on the WebSphere
backbone. The rules are segregated and they interface easily using ILOG into that
backbone.

Similarly, we’re moving away from our traditional reporting structure for our reports to
Cognos because having a business intelligence tool instead of just a reporting tool
makes a huge difference on the flexibility, on our ability to go and make reports quickly
and change reports quickly.

If you can create tools that allow you go directly from what the customer understands to
production, then you have saved yourself those steps and you have an alignment
between the rules or the workflow or the reports that you would show the customer and
the resulting production system

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