The State of Arizona’s Department of Education serves Arizona’s education community and ensures every child has access to an excellent education. The department oversees the K-12 public education system, supports 15 county-level education agencies, more than 200 public school districts, over 400 charter holders, 13 Joint Technological Education Districts, and approximately 90,000 certified teachers.
The Challenge
The Arizona Department of Education maintains rules for a variety of different programs, including membership rules, student and teacher course rules, accountability rules, payment rules, and many more. To manage these programs and associated business rules, the department used five different non-interoperating systems. Therefore, both business rules and data were not properly aggregated across systems, creating a data integrity issue. Since several different data points were acquired across multiple systems, the department could not be sure of the data’s accuracy. Finally, the business rules were all hard-coded so when a rule change was required it took the development team days to complete the update. To overcome these challenges, the department identified a business rules management system (BRMS) as a solution that could help them aggregate and cleanse their data, and manage the business rules across their multiple programs.
Solution
The state evaluated four separate BRMS solutions before selecting InRule®. Early in the project, InRule’s professional services team performed an audit of the department’s systems and rules. The team evaluated over 3,000 business rules and found 750 duplicate rules and/or errors. InRule then helped harvest these business rules from their legacy systems and migrate them into InRule. Additionally, InRule set up two different instances of its rules engine, one to aggregate the department’s data and another to cleanse the data so the department could ensure its integrity.
Results
Through a series of rules and workflows, InRule transformed the data received from various education agencies and sources to allow for a more secure and integrated exchange of student information. Agencies, districts and schools can now develop dashboards that provide permission-based insights into detailed student level data. The department now runs over 700 business rules across two connected rule engines that acquire data from multiple agencies.
The state has realized significant results by using InRule as their BRMS provider. The department processes anywhere from 5 million to 15 million transactions a night, this process used to take 12 hours, however now it only takes two hours, representing a reduction in processing time by 83%. With InRule’s help, the State of Arizona’s Department of Education now has one system that integrates with several other state agency systems, ensuring accurate data spread throughout the department – saving time and money.
Daily Transactions 5 to 15 Million
With Hard-Coded Logic 12 hours
With InRule 2 hours
Processing Time Reduction 83%
