With its county seat in White Plains, N.Y., Westchester county is located within the New York City metropolitan area and serves approximately 925,000 county residents. Westchester county's Department of Information Technology (DoIT) oversees the county's use of existing and emerging technologies in government operations, and its delivery of services to the public.
"We seek technology solutions that transcend departmental divisions and satisfy the needs of our organization as a whole," said Westchester county's Chief Information Officer Dr. Norman Jacknis. "Haley's business rules service will enable us to do just that. This initiative is consistent with our multi-tiered approach to software development and our objective of externalizing the capture and management of business logic."
While Jacknis foresees multiple ways to leverage a rules service infrastructure across county IT initiatives, two projects are already under way. The first project supports the community response plan for the Indian Point nuclear power plant and will use Westchester County's rules server to automate an emergency advisory application that will alert officials of incidents and recommend appropriate responses.
The second project will support an automated reservations system to help county case workers more efficiently find appropriate shelter for individuals that find themselves homeless due to emergency or chronic situations.
"We selected Haley Systems for multiple reasons," continued Dr. Jacknis, who was recently listed among Government Technology's "Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers" of 2005. "Haley is the only business rules management system with the natural language understanding that enables county managers making decisions to capture and manage business logic themselves using plain English rather than programming code. That gives them more control, and it also reduces the burden on our IT resources, freeing them up to tackle other priorities."
