The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (OTPPB) administers a US$35Billion fund on behalf of over 150,000 working teachers and over 50,000 retired educators in the province of Ontario, Canada. The fund has been in existence since 1917, and is defined according to legislation from the provincial government. Regular updates occur to the plan definition every few years as a result of changes in legislation, and also occur in an ongoing manner with new interpretations and clarifications of the plan. In the career of a teacher, which can span several decades, their pension options are also affected by changes in employment, strikes, leaves of absence, transfers, maternity leave, etc. It is the challenge of the administration branch of the OTPPB to follow all these events through the decades and to be able to give its customers (the teachers, their employers, their beneficiaries, etc) personalized up-to-date information in a matter of seconds, accurate to the penny on amounts surpassing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The MIS group of the administration branch of OTPPB must build and maintain systems to accomplish that challenge.
There is a multi-year development effort under way at OTPPB to build an administration system using objects to manage all aspects of administration of the pension fund. The Benefit Entitlement System for Teachers ("BEST") uses Smalltalk on PCs as clients to AS/400 database and imaging servers. The project has been underway for 1.5 years and has been initially deployed on 20 desktops; over the next 2.5 years it will be deployed on over 300 more desks and will include access via telephony and the internet.
Work that has been completed thus far include a transport layer from a relational database to objects (using a multi-process scheduling mechanism and allowing a pure object domain model), an initial desktop GUI (following the Windows NT look/feel), initial workflow apparatus (for access to an imaging server and case queues), an object-oriented regression testing tool (deployed on 10 desktops in our testing department), and some employment history analysis tools.
Over the next year, the plan is to turn the object domain model into a transaction-driven system (based on the events that occur in a teacher's career) and to build a rules engine and a rule-based representation of the pension plan definition. The transaction system and the rules engine will work together to maintain up-to-date accrual and withdrawal information for teachers. Furthermore, the system should be able to anticipate events in the teachers' careers to provide up-to-date estimates, in an intelligent manner, for future balances. At the same time, a true workflow system will be introduced, taking OTPPB to a paperless office.
Outstanding challenges for analysis and design at OTPPB for BEST exists in several of the above areas, specifically to do with Business Transactions. Given a (possibly predicted) event in a teacher's career (eg another month of employment), what objects should be notified and how? What work items should be spawned for OTPPB employees? What future events may be predicted based on new information? How are rules represented as objects, how do they interact with accumulated and predicted teacher information, and how do changes and updates to rules (themselves transactions) percolate through the system? The answer is to create a completely transaction-oriented domain that will coexist peaceably with existing persistency constraints (and other applications), enable corporate workflow, and produce fast, accurate results for the teachers.
Dean Mackie
Dean Mackie has been a Technical Team Leader in Development for MIS Administration at OTPPB since February 1996. Prior to that he was a consultant/mentor at ParcPlace-Digitalk, consulting on object projects throughout USA and Canada. Prior to that, as a tech lead at Discis Knowledge Research, he lead an object project for a multimedia production system using an OODBMS, a natural language parser, and an object-to-SGML transport layer. Prior to that, as a tech lead at Celestica Inc/IBM Canada, he lead the first deployment of the DACS shop-floor analysis/control system at a major ECAT factory using Smalltalk, C++, and an OODBMS. Dean holds a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and an M.Sc. from the University of California. Dean gave several IBM ITL papers on object-oriented modeling of business processes, has spoken on panels at the High-Performance Transaction Systems Workshop and ObjectWorld, and (get this) has co-authored several books for children on using computers.