State Departments of Education and Corticon Promote Better Automation with Less Budget

The Economic Policy Institute projects a nationwide shortage of 200,000 teachers by 2025. To avoid drastic impacts on the public schools, state departments of education will have to get creative with programs to train, certify and support new teachers and keep them engaged.

As states update and expand certification programs, IT departments must respond nimbly with automated apps that serve state employees, school administrators and teachers. But if they’re constrained by rigid legacy software, they may not be able to meet the department’s needs in the required timeframes. In other words, state IT teams need a way to automate new functions quickly with less cost.

Faced with similar technical challenges, many states have relied on Progress Corticon business rules management system (BRMS) to streamline development and help modernize their operations. In fact, Corticon customers realize a 90% reduction in time to market for IT applications.

For state departments of education, Corticon executes the logic required to review certification applications, handle alternate requirements for special programs, determine continuing education status and more. With Corticon, states can offer more self-service and proactive outreach, cutting down on the time education experts spend managing the system and freeing up budget for more strategic projects.

Progress Corticon improves development and maintenance for essential transactions:

• Standard teaching certification processing
• Alternate teaching certification processing
• Applicant status
• Continuing education compliance
• Notification of requirements and deadlines
• Interstate reciprocity
• Appeals and reviews
• Internal and external audits

Read: Corticon & State Governments ebook

A BRMS Shortens Project Time and Reduces Cost

When automating teacher certification or ongoing education requirements, an application has to implement the business rules, such as the number of student teaching hours or the relevant degrees required for approval. Business rules management software executes this logic and makes it available to any application depending on it.

Speed development cycles with fewer person-hours

Many states are using custom-developed software to handle their certification functions. But those applications often embed the business logic deep in the code, where it’s hard to find. And in many cases, different functions, like backend applications, employee screens and applicant-facing services, are handled by separate systems, each with their own version of the business rules.

When the state needs to make a change to one of the certification rules or add new regulations, the IT group has to comb through old code looking for the relevant sections. The process takes time, and if there are multiple applications coding the same logic, the labor and cost for any single update multiplies.

A BRMS handles all the logical rules in one place. So developers quickly find the relevant pieces to update when a change is required. And it only needs to be updated one time for use by any application.

Ensure compliance and reduce risk

When business rules are scattered throughout pages and pages of code, it’s difficult to update specific rules without making mistakes. As a state agency, a department of education has a mandate to ensure accuracy and prevent possible harm from technical errors. A BRMS helps solve the problem by simplifying the update process, lowering the risk of problems.

Corticon Maximizes the Value of a BRMS

Crafted and honed over decades of business rules implementations, Corticon includes features that ensure the highest return on a BRMS investment. The development environment encourages quality code and best practices while the deployment server offers flexible architectural options.

Increase quality and lower costs by giving subject experts the ability to model rules

Many project teams struggle with communication, especially when subject matter experts try to record complex business rules in a dense requirements document and IT is left to interpret it. The process takes times and is prone to misunderstandings.

Corticon’s no-coding, user-friendly development environment, Studio, paves the way for education experts to encode the business logic themselves, ensuring the rules are written exactly as they require. From Studio, rule modelers can export deployment-ready code directly to IT.

Reduce the risk of expensive bugs

Every project manager dreads the prospect of a software bug caught late in the development process. Errors that go unnoticed until integration testing or deployment can cost 10 to 30 times more to fix than those snagged in the requirements phase.

Corticon helps prevent any bugs in logical processes with its extensive test suite. Rule modelers can test both live data and stored use cases to ensure every data scenario runs properly. They can also save test suites with known good results as a key element of regression testing to prevent problems introduced during updates.

Flexibility to adapt for IT modernization

As IT groups update their technology, the BRMS must be able to work with different architectures and software stacks or it won’t continue to add value. Corticon is designed to work as a service in Java or .Net environments, with legacy mainframes, REST-based web applications, or containerized cloud-based applications.

Corticon Is the Chosen Solution for 28 State Governments

Corticon has been selected for government applications in 28 states. It currently handles transactions from health and human services to vehicle licensing and registration.

States turn to Corticon because of its flexibility to grow with them as they modernize away from legacy systems. And as states add automation for an increasingly demanding public, Corticon helps keep the budget manageable. Corticon’s world-class reliability, unparalleled performance and linear scalability handle millions of mission-critical transactions every day.

There’s nothing like firsthand experience to help you determine if Corticon is right for your state. If you’d like to test drive this powerful rules engine and see for yourself, download a trial version or request a demo today.

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