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SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT & INTEGRATION CASE STUDIES

Web-Enabling Client/Server Applications

The District of Columbia's State Education Office (SEO) is responsible for providing a host of financial services to help the District government meet higher education goals. DC residents may apply for SEO-managed financial assistance for post-secondary education. Two of the options for this assistance are the DC Tuition Assistance Grant Program (DCTAG) and the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership (LEAP) Program.

The business processes behind these applications has been primarily paper-based with the support of a client-server application for data entry and processing. Unfortunately, the consequence of this was that the processing of applications for financial assistance was unnecessarily inefficient, time-consuming, redundant, work-intensive, and costly. To address these issues, the District Government called on DBTS personnel to help web-enable the front end of the DCTAG and LEAP applications, allowing residents to apply and track application status online at http://educationcenter.dc.gov.

The DBTS Systems Analyst and Programmer were responsible for business process analysis and reengineering, requirements analysis, definition, and management, application and database design, programming, quality assurance and testing, and implementation of the online application system. The team set out to accomplish the following overall tasks:

Create a database structure for storing content and data to provide online features and processes for the online application system.
Develop a new web administration system for the initial processing of applications that are submitted online.

The system to be launched by the end of March will feature the following:

The Web system will provide a secure login and registration.
Users will be able to check their eligibility to a specific DC Financial Aid Program/ Group of DC Financial Aid Programs.
Students will be able to apply online.
Students will be able to check their application status.
The Web system will send email notifications to students informing them of a change in their application status.
The Web system will provide a tool for validators to review student-submitted Web applications.
Program Administrators will be able to validate and manage student-submitted Web applications.
The Web system will allow Administrators to manage administrative users, student-submitted Web applications and system applications.