Houston Industries (HL&P)
Primary analyst /developer, Legislative Tracking System — Oct. ‘96 to Jan ‘97
This was cool. It’s hard to get anything by the corporate lobby. Houston Industries wanted a system that updated daily with all newly introduced lesgislation as well as amendments to proposed legislation as it moved through committees.
Wouldn’t you know there is a service that provides the full text of every bill with amendments. This is back in 1997 so it was not so much available “on-line” as it was available electronically. We dialed in, believe it or not.
Once the download file was parsed and the new and updated records were injected into the proper place in the database, a workflow was automatically kicked off that prompted appropriate parties to address a new or updated bill. Kinda like a file folder that gets circulated around and you have to initial it when your finished reading it.
With this system, Houston Industries was able to keep up with those bills that adversely or beneficially affect it’s business interest’s and helped the company target their lobbying efforts towards those issues having the most impact on operations.
Another benefit of doing this review and analysis process electronically is that it reduces the risk posed from politicians slipping in amendments in the middle of the night. The next day at Houston Industries twenty bean counters are poring over every detail and poised to loose the hounds if needed.
Here is what I did:
- Wrote shell scripts to download and parse new and updated bills in the Texas legislature and insert each new record into the bill analysis workflow. The scripts were scheduled to run every night during the legislative session.
- Wrote application to automate workflow of distributing bills to appropriate departments for analysis and comment
- Aggregated all comments for every bill into a report and transmitted to company agents in Austin for further action.
- Integrated application into production environment and assisted with user training.
