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Case Study: The Annie E. Casey Foundation

ASP.NET saves time and money for this philanthropicorganization - and that means faster grants for those who need them.

By Ron Schwarz

In an economy that daily challenges even the stoutest ofhearts, it's crucial that established philanthropic organizations squeeze everylast bit of value out of their increasingly precious funding resources.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) - established in 1948by Jim Casey, founder of United Parcel Service - has a primary mission offostering public policies, human-service reforms, and community supports thatmeet the needs of vulnerable children and families more effectively.

Working out of its Baltimore, Md., headquarters with astaff of under 200 employees, AECF - the 14th-largest private foundation in thenation, with an endowment of more than $2.6 billion - balances an endlesssupply of needs with a finite supply of assistance. It distributes more than$250 million per year to organizations that work with disadvantaged children orassist in the changes needed to support children.

The foundation's grant-making process generally is startedby program staff, and it involves people in the social services field: juvenilejustice experts, education experts, those who address teen pregnancy and healthcare issues, and "the whole gamut of areas we get involved in: financialplanning, government services, and so forth," according to Henry Dennig, AECF'sdirector of Technology and Information Management.

About 120 staff members work on the program side of thefoundation, working with other organizations and making grant requests forthem. Those "other organizations" can be very large, including household namessuch as United Way, Boy Scouts of America, and Girl Scouts of the USA. Theyalso assist individual city and town communities and faith-based organizations,and they are involved with policy-making bodies such the New York City ChildWelfare Advisory Panel.

AECF's technology situation is typical of many companies:Its applications work - even work well - but simply can't scale and evolvesuccessfully with the organization's needs. Every organization in this positioneventually must face the need either to conform (and restrict) its workpractices to its existing software, or make the leap to a different applicationset.

Casey's first decision was simple. The foundation hadworked with Ajilon Consulting two years ago to deliver the application AECF nowhas in place named Request Initiation Forms (RIF). AECF was pleased enough withthe results to work with the company again.

RIF - a front end to its legacy grant-making system - gaveCasey a taste of what was possible. It used Outlook Forms and Exchange Serverin an effort to extend and improve the legacy system's design and inflexiblefunctionality. The goal was a system that modeled the foundation's actualworkflow more closely.

Dennig describes the rationale for going with the originalRIF project: "In an effort to achieve better data integrity and consistency, wechose about 18 months ago to create a front end to collect the data up frontbefore it goes into the legacy software. That's where we got involved withAjilon Consulting and the RIF project. RIF runs Outlook in public folders,allowing our staff to put in requests and grant activity, which is thenreviewed by the grant management team."

Inside Outlook

Unfortunately, Dennig discovered that the Outlook Formswere not sufficiently robust or functionally capable. "Public folders andpublic forms didn't allow the users to do some of the necessary workflow anddidn't allow data validation or data flow that was hoped for," Dennig says. But"by doing it in .NET, they were able to start from a clean sheet of paper andredesign it from top to bottom."

For nearly two years, RIF has done what it was designed todo. But AECF has outgrown the system. "In light of the intranet that we've setup and the SharePoint server and Knowledge Management we're planning to set up,we wanted a grant-making application that was more capable than RIF," he says."And, quite honestly, storing all that information in the public folder messagestore probably wasn't the best data container. We liked the idea of storing itin a SQL back end."

Dennig points out that in addition to the Outlook Formsstability and productivity issues, "there were many functionality requests thatwe simply couldn't program that way." The shortcomings of the Outlook Formscontext created an increasing pace of revision requests. So AECF sat down withAjilon and reviewed what they had and what they wanted to do. After a series ofmeetings with users and the grant management team, they came up with anapproach to create the new system using the .NET Framework.

Major software projects develop on several concurrentlevels. At the top level, customer needs and desires - often frustratinglyintertwined - command a nontrivial amount of developer attention. In Casey'scase, the main objective was clear and obvious: The foundation needed to reducethe amount of time needed to deliver grant funds to the recipients. At thelowest core level, developers wrestle with technical issues and often withconveying technical considerations to users who are by nature fixated on moreephemeral matters such as fonts, layout, colors, and other screen appearanceelements.

In fairness to the users, interface "trivia" does matter.Bad interfaces hamper good programs, which leads to lessened productivity. "Usergroups can get bogged down with minutia," says Jim Lane, a senior .NETsolutions developer at Ajilon and lead architect for the AECF project. "For us,however, it was important to maintain a rich and productive user interface andapplication."

Developers sometimes lose focus on the fact that the userinterface is the first and sometimes only portion of any application users see.In the real world, developers must balance the demands for a robust interfacewith the needs of a well architected solution - fail on either end of the scaleand an application can be destined for collapse.

Balancing Act

Combining Microsoft's ASP.NET and Infragistics'NetAdvantage Suite created a synergy that gave Lane the ability to balance bothends of that scale successfully (see Figure 1). ASP.NET's elegant underpinningsprovided the horsepower that made the application work, and the Infragisticstools made it possible to satisfy the users' interface demands - without takingdevelopment time away from critical tasks.

Figure 1. Ajilon used NetAdvantage Suite's Tree control to create anelegant navigation hierarchy. Users appreciate the classic interface's familiarlook and feel.

On behalf of AECF, Ajilon evaluated all the main optionson the market before concluding that ASP.NET was best suited to thefoundation's needs. Ajilon chose .NET because it was the most scalable platformand projected to be the lowest cost to develop and maintain. As a full-servicesolutions provider, Ajilon has extensive knowledge and experience with all themajor platforms, including Java. This was important because in addition to thecore grant-making functionality, a legacy system also included a custom-builtJava-based portal system that handled announcements, communications, messaging,and so forth.

Early in the project's analysis phase, the developersrecognized that the client's needs required a Web interface. One of therecognized advantages to the original RIF project was, however, its traditionalRich Client/Server interface. Lane knew he needed to implement a similar frontend for the new eRIF package, but he didn't want the nightmare of coding aWindows-style interface in HTML. The Infragistics package's kit of interfaceelements - the grid, tab, and other screen controls - let him deliver the slickinterface users demanded while focusing his efforts on the project's "under thehood" aspects.

A project of this scope was projected to require eight to12 months of work by a team of three to four developers if delivered as atraditional ASP solution. Using ASP.NET and the NetAdvantage Suite, Lanedelivered the solution in five months working by himself.

Part of the development time savings was attributed toASP.NET's ability to use an XML/SOAP Web service to interface to the legacyJava-based portal system. The Infragistics tools also accounted for majordevelopment efficiency. The XML Web service enabled near real-time messagingbetween the new application and the legacy portal, which combined with COM+Component Services ensured message integrity and delivery. In addition, Laneimplemented a completely object-oriented architecture throughout theapplication, anticipating it would ease future maintenance efforts.

The development process began with a series of meetingswith users to analyze the existing workflow and methodology and map out animplementation plan. Lane worked closely with Brad McCabe, technologyevangelist for Infragistics, to maximize the NetAdvantage Suite's capabilities.The suite's ability to expose and inherit functionality - unlike typical "blackbox" toolkits - provided the sort of transparency that translated intosignificant development efficiencies. Lane was able to extend the Infragisticscontrols to suit AECF's unique needs.

There was more at stake than mere user convenience. Thefoundation is subject to compliance with IRS regulations and is obligated toensure the money they grant is benefiting the intended end goals. Therefore,the system needed to deliver a variety of reports, some of which aretext-intensive and - previously - labor-intensive. But the overriding concernwas delivering the final product: the check. Checks must be delivered to theintended recipient in a timely manner. Dennig describes AECF's goal as"reducing the grant approval time and making the dispensing of funds as quickand painless for our grantees as possible."

The eRIF package also needs to work with the existinglegacy grant-making system. In addition to the legacy system's contractualissues, Lane struggled with data-porting tasks because of the database'sproprietary nature and its lack of any facility to enable external interfaces.Although the database was stored in SQL Server 2000, it was impractical toaccess it directly.

Future-Proofed Foundation

Future growth is a significant consideration. Lane saysAECF "wants to be able to make some of the information available to theirgrantees so that they can track the progress of their requests, track theprogress of their grants, and other information."

Lane decided on a standard ASP.NET architecture on top ofthe .NET Framework, with a SQL Server 2000 back end (see Figure 2). All I/O ishandled by stored procedures. The system uses three servers: one for the mainWeb application, a second for Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server, and the thirdhandling the XML Web Service and COM+ Component Services.

Figure 2.The eRIF project is a compendium of .NET C# code, third-partycontrols, legacy Java applications, and COM+ components. The InfragisticsNetAdvantage Suite's controls made it possible to deliver the product in rapidtime with a high level of user satisfaction.

The workflow begins with program officers, who generatenew grant requests. From there, it is routed to senior managers who make apreliminary determination on whether or not to authorize a grant. This is aniterative process. The next step is to route the approved requests to theGrants Management and Finance departments to process the grant. After finalapproval, various documents and reports are generated for the president forsignature and routing to the grantees.

In addition to the essential functionality, Lane was ableto implement a series of productivity features, including spell and grammarcheck and usage of Microsoft Web Storage technology for document managementwithin the Web application (he used COM+ to access Microsoft Office componentson the server side). He also was able to enhance the UI cosmetics via theMicrosoft DirectX and WEFT technologies.

Lane says he "worked from the back end forward," startingwith the middle-tier business rule layers, moving on to the front-end visualcomponents, and finally tying it all together. He enjoyed the ability to embedthe Infragistics ASP.NET Navigator component for dropdown menus in ASP.NET Usercontrols (see Figure 3). This worked nicely with the .NET Framework's "out ofthe box" back-end "plumbing" capabilities. Lane says under traditional ASPdevelopment constraints, he would have needed one full-time person to handlemundane programming tasks such as JavaScript menus, which are now layered inand transparent. He says if he does "need to get into plumbing," he can,without difficulty.

Figure 3. Ajilon leveraged ASP.NET to deliver a Windows Rich Clientinterface in a Web application. He implemented features such as pull-down menuswithout the grunt work necessary in a traditional ASP project.

Once "under the hood," Lane experienced major benefitsfrom being able to use the Infragistics NetAdvantage Suite's controls tointegrate directly with ADO.NET. Because it could consume and bind to ADO.NETdatasets, he was able to employ a highly customized UI and code in a mannerthat will ease future maintenance tasks. He praises ADO.NET's ability to exposedatasets' internal structures, eliminating the need for custom-built data objects.

Beat the Wrap

Lane also wrapped the legacy Java portal so users couldaccess messaging and message broadcasting without changing the underlyingmessage system. The eRIF will also interface with the Grant Tracker Online -the finance application that will verify budget balances as the processproceeds. A typical scenario he describes under the new system involves granttraffic handling: A manager in the field who needs approval for a grant processwants to hit the portal and see a message saying, "Mr. Jones, we need approvalfor preliminary funding for a grant for ABC ..." The new eRIF system sends asignal to the Java portal using Web Services, which is possible because theportal can "talk XML." "We were able to work to smooth communication with thenew software," Lane says.

Still, because of Java's scaling issues, he was concernedwith the probability of the new application waiting on the legacy messagingcode. He used MSMQ and COM+ to work with the Web service to talk to the Javaportal, synchronizing operations with the message queue.

There are two tentative plans for Phase Two. First, Ajilonwill beef up eRIF's reporting functionality. Lane wants to let end users andadministrative groups see where their money is going and get away from the currentdata-driven administrative interface. He plans on designing the necessaryadministration screens to address the needs so nontechnical staffers can managecommon administrative tasks.

Microsoft has taken note of AECF's use of ASP.NET inmigrating its system. "XML Web services are breaking down barriers forenterprises and charitable organizations alike," says John Montgomery,Microsoft's director of the Developer Platform and Evangelism Division. "We'reextremely gratified to see that AECF has chosen .NET for building new, highlyintegrated applications that enable the organization to focus on serving theneeds of children."

With eRIF, AECF projects a 25 percent reduction inturnaround time from grant proposal to funds disbursal. By using ASP.NET, Ajilonreduced the development cost by approximately a 5-to-1 ratio. End-usersatisfaction improves because the new UI and workflow provide a tight match tothe way they perform their work, as well as a reduced complexity by eliminatingmultiple interfaces during each grant application's data-gathering phase. ".NETcan help stretch IT budgets and help make the cut from current systems ASAP,"Lane says. In the case of AECF, this means more money -sooner - into the handsof those who need it.

Ron Schwarz is a programmer who left New York City forthe wilds of rural Michigan, where he writes the occasional article andprogram. He welcomes your comments at http://www.clubvb.com.

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