Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Corrections Department Upgrades System
To Meet Changing Business Needs
Overview
Country or Region:New Zealand
Industry: Government-justice
Customer Profile
The New Zealand Department of Corrections administers the country’s prisons and corrections programs with the goal of protecting the public and integrating offenders back into society.
Business Situation
The department needed a better, faster way to modify its aging Integrated Offender Management System (IOMS). Changes to IOMS required up to six weeks for regression testing.
Solution
By using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 with Windows® Workflow Foundation, the department made it easier to modify IOMS to support new legislation and evolving business requirements.
Benefits
Manages rigorous workflow
Supports a service-oriented architecture
Increases developer productivity / “Windows Workflow Foundation has worked extremely well for us.… We’ve saved at least 50 percent in development costs and lead times over alternative approaches.”
Thomas Perry, Director of New Technologies,New Zealand Department of Corrections
The New Zealand Department of Corrections depends on its Integrated Offender Management System (IOMS) to manage offenders in prison, on parole, or serving community-based sentences. With IOMS technology reaching end-of-life, the system became increasingly difficult to modify to support evolving business requirements. To more closely align IOMS with business needs, the department decided to migrate the system to a service-oriented architecture and the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Intergen assisted the Department of Corrections in selecting Windows® Workflow Foundation for business process modeling, for Web services coordination, and as a rules engine. Integrated with familiar tools from Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, Windows Workflow Foundation helps abstract business rules so that department developers can modify IOMS in days instead of weeks.
Situation
The New Zealand Department of Corrections was instituted in 1995 to protect the public and implement the orders of the New Zealand courtsystem. The department relies on information technology to efficiently manage its operations and, in 1999, it deployed the Integrated Offender Management System (IOMS). This system, which was originally developed using Microsoft® Visual Basic®3.0, is essential to the department’s success and has grown along with the department’s business needs.
Pressure to Adapt
IOMS tracks 8,500 prisoners in department custody, 1,130 offenders on parole, and 27,900 offenders serving community work sentences. Making things even more complex, IOMS is constantly changing to support new offender management approaches, new legislation, and new government requirements.
“True to its name, IOMS tracks tens of thousands of offenders from the time they enter our jurisdiction. We use IOMS to manage a multitude of interrelated issues: their sentencing, behavioral records, education, and healthcare,” says Thomas Perry, Director of New Technologies for the New Zealand Department of Corrections. “IOMS is always under pressure to adapt to new business requirements. For example, whenever Parliament passes new legislation or changes are made to government rules, New Zealand law requires the Department of Corrections to reflect these changes.”
Besides responding to legislative changes, IOMS must also support new corrections approaches. For example, as part of its “Effective Interventions” effort to reduce both crime rates and prison populations, the department is working with other government agencies on community-based sentences. This innovative approach involves electronic monitoring technology that would enable the department to set limits and supervise the activities of offenders granted limited integration into the community. IOMS needed additional functionality to support these capabilities.
However, changing IOMS was not a trivial task. IOMS was based on a traditional three-tier architecture that incorporated business logic at every layer. This meant that changes in one part could affect operations in other parts, and updates required up to six weeks of testing to ensure everything still functioned correctly. The challenges became more problematic as the system expanded.
Move to a New Architecture
“In 2004, the Department of Corrections began a review of IOMS to assess its performance and define a plan for the future. By that time, IOMS had grown to become one of the largest Visual Basic 6.0 applications in the Southern Hemisphere as we added significant functionality to accommodate new legislation,” says Perry.
The review confirmed that IOMS met the department’s needs, but it needed to respond faster and be more flexible to support business changes. The department decided to migrate to the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 for improved application performance and access to modern, standards-based development technologies. The .NET Framework 3.0 is the managed-code programming model for building applications on the Windows® platform. The department also planned to use a service-oriented approach that would enable it to add new functionality alongside its old systems, thus making the most of the department’s initial investment.
For the upgraded IOMS to respond to changing business needs with maximum efficiency, the department needed a rules engine that would separate business rules from application code and manage them using a separate software component. This critical architecture component would enable the Department of Corrections to more quickly respond to new business and legislative requirements by modifying business rules, not application code.
Solution
After the Department of Corrections began migrating IOMS to the .NET Framework 3.0 in early 2005, the architecture team considered Windows Workflow Foundation for workflow modeling, for Web services coordination, and as a rules engine. Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine, and toolset for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows.
Because the rules engine would play such a critical part in the migration, all options were carefully investigated and evaluated. The Department of Corrections engaged Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Intergen to provide best practice evaluation and technical verification concerning its planned use of Windows Workflow Foundation. Intergen’s findings verified the department’s approach and provided some additional recommendations that helped during implementation.
The department’s new service-oriented architecture decouples modules and makes them available to the system via Web services. Windows Workflow Foundation orchestrates the interactions between process-intensive Web services and also supports modeling of the department’s business processes. Now, when developers need to make a change due to new legislation or other business requirements, they do not need to delve into the application code. Instead, they access high-level tools to edit the Windows Workflow Foundation model. Figure 1 illustrates how the new service-oriented, .NET Framework 3.0–based IOMS functionality operates alongside the older code.
“In the first phase of the migration, we rewrote roughly a quarter of IOMS functionality. Windows Workflow Foundation simplified that task, but also provided excellent resources that will make our system much easier to modify and maintain in the future. In addition, because Windows Workflow Foundation is part of the .NET Framework 3.0 and freely available, we avoided licensing complications that a stand-alone rules-engine product would have involved,” says Perry.
The Department of Corrections depended on the integration between Windows Workflow Foundation and the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system to finish the first phase of the IOMS upgrade in six months.
Windows Workflow Foundation enabled the department’s development team to build a rules engine that manages the relationships between the department’s business rules. Because these business rules are accessible through Visual Studio, developers can easily incorporate business rules into their code. For example, during the recent upgrade, department developers used Windows Workflow Foundation to build in conditions and rules that simplify the management of community-based sentences.
Windows Workflow Foundation comes with a workflow designer that enables developers to quickly incorporate, create, and modify business rule–compliant workflows with drag-and-drop tools in Visual Studio, as shown in Figure 2.
“Our developers immediately felt comfortable using Windows Workflow Foundation because it was integrated into Visual Studio 2005,” says Perry. “It didn’t feel as though we were using a separate package.”
Benefits
Windows Workflow Foundation provided the
Department of Corrections with an easily accessible business rules engine and workflow component that are critical to the new service-oriented architecture. These components help make it easier to design and build new functions, making IOMS much simpler to modify and maintain.
“Windows Workflow Foundation has worked extremely well for us. It provides a reliable rules engine that has proven very easy to work with. We’ve saved at least 50 percent in development costs and lead times over alternative approaches,” says Perry.
Manages Rigorous Workflow
Windows Workflow Foundation strengthens workflow within IOMS—a significant feat considering the vast range of tasks and processes involved in managing thousands of diverse offender sentences. For example, IOMS now supports built-in rules surrounding the electronic monitoring of offenders serving community-based sentences. Windows Workflow Foundation provides the rules engine and business process modeling that enable IOMS to adjust to changing scenarios while ensuring that policy is enforced.
“Windows Workflow Foundation helps align our IT systems with business processes. This results in a more functional and streamlined system for the management and rehabilitation of offenders,” says Perry.
Supports a Service-Oriented Architecture
With Windows Workflow Foundation, the department can model its business processes and more easily manage the interactions between process-intensive Web services. And because changes are implemented in the model instead of deep in the application code, IOMS can more quickly respond to evolving department business requirements.
“From a maintenance and manageability standpoint, Windows Workflow Foundation allows us to implement changes without having to recompile the entire IOMS. And with the service-oriented architecture, regression testing is limited to the module being changed and is finished within a day instead of weeks,” says Perry.
Increases Developer Productivity
Unlike other workflow tools, Windows Workflow Foundation operates in the development environment of Visual Studio 2005, which enables developers to apply their expertise in Visual Basic.
“Because Windows Workflow Foundation was immediately familiar to the development team, we didn’t have constraints around who specialized in workflow. People didn’t feel they needed special study or research to get up to speed,” says Perry.
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