New York State Integrated Eligibility System Uses Intellisys to Automate Business Rules Extraction from 31 Million Lines of Legacy Code

New York State’s original Integrated Eligibility System dates back to the 1970s. The system was comprised of four core COBOL systems that support the state’s health and human services programs: Welfare Management, the Financial System, Child Support and Fair Hearings. Over the years, several additional systems were added that provided technology updates for these core systems such as allowing customers to apply for benefits through a web interface. However, the source system of the data remained in the COBOL systems. In addition, the way in which these systems interacted with the original systems resulted in a significant amount of duplication of business logic, which complicated maintenance and update efforts for the systems. Driven by the need to simplify the user experience, the ability to react rapidly to Federal and State regulatory changes, and a host of other supportability and maintainability risks, the State decided to embark upon a modernization effort for IES to rationalize and bring these systems together into one ecosystem. The plan for this ecosystem was to leverage various modern third-party technical frameworks, platforms, and architectures within a unified portal. 

 

To ensure a seamless transition during the transformation, the State prioritized a ‘no stone unturned’ approach for all existing capabilities and regulations. This required the IES team to incorporate a rigorous business rules extraction and disposition strategy at the outset of its modernization efforts. After a thorough evaluation of available tools, the State chose EvolveWare’s Intellisys platform to automate documentation generation and business rules extraction from the legacy systems. Intellisys enabled the IES team to classify the extracted rules by business and technical domains and features, facilitating a logical evolution to the new business-driven, microservice-based architecture while maintaining traceability to ensure all modules of legacy code were accounted for. The Intellisys platform was also easily integrated into the State’s existing suite of best-practice agile development tools, including Jira for task management, Blueprint for requirements management, IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) for business rules management, and GitHub for code repository and version control. 

 

To provide the flexibility to run parallel rule extraction efforts, the State developed a Center of Excellence responsible for distributing enterprise business rules standards to ensure compliance and consistency across the multiple workstreams. EvolveWare and the IES team then worked together to integrate leading practices for rules extraction within the organization’s unique legacy and modern development environment, which were in line with the overall IES’ business transformation vision. Additionally, EvolveWare integrated key IES feature requests into its Intellisys platform that assisted in automation, traceability, and implementation reporting.