Integrated Criminal Justice Solution

Computech staff created a data exchange governance model to increase communication for a large, prominent Northeast State, as part of a larger justice system modernization project.

Challenges:

A large, prominent Northeast State, considered to be a leader and trendsetter in integrated criminal justice, recognized that in order to keep up with the evolving demands of their justice stakeholders, they needed to upgrade their existing mainframe-based systems that connected their law and justice entities to other in-State and out of State Federal justice agencies and services. The legacy systems, which had evolved over 20 years, were experiencing numerous issues related to their age and organic growth, such as:

  • Multiple point-to-point connections
  • Proprietary and legacy protocols and formats
  • No standard business vocabulary
  • Manual (some paper-based) processes
  • Islands of data with no unified view of information
  • Expensive and time-consuming to make changes

Key mission-critical, high performance mainframe based system used by all law enforcement agencies in this State needed to be replaced with a new Integrated Justice Portal, built using open technologies and based on industry standards and principles of Services Oriented Architecture and the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

Solution:

The State replaced the Mainframe-based Law Enforcement/Criminal Justice Services with a one-stop information shopping platform for all Law Enforcement/Criminal Justice entities and users.

Clearly defined business objectives of the upgrade included:

  • Improve the availability of justice information to the user community by providing a single point of access to criminal justice information from multiple sources
  • Improve end user processes by reusing existing data and reduce cycle time by presenting aggregated information; reduce redundancies
  • Comply with FBI CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) security standards, and National Crime Information Center (NCIC 2000) requirements, all while maintaining existing response times and current levels of accuracy and completeness of information

Among the chief technology objectives implemented:

  • A multi-year information technology (IT) strategy to replace the legacy systems
  • A standards-based technology and enable a mobile workforce
  • An information sharing environment that grows as the information needs and sources grow; either by adding new data repositories, or expanding the environment to enable more agencies to co-host their business services

NIEM played a critical role in defining standardized information exchange interfaces within the different components of the solution (developed by different groups), and other external entities.  The State is recognized as an early adopter of NIEM, and the solution is among the largest NIEM implementations, processing more than 1.5 million NIEM based messages per day.  [More information about NIEM can be found at www.NIEM.gov.]

The State also recognized the importance of training and change management; the new solution would only be successful if the people using it embraced the new technology.  Changing the behavior of users long accustomed to the legacy system was a critical priority for the State.

Notable Results:

Computech team members played a significant role in the development and rollout of this solution, which provided an information sharing environment where services from multiple mission partners were deployed in a shared infrastructure (like a private cloud). The resulting  governance model also allowed for quick changes and enhancements as the mission requirements changed.

From a NIEM perspective, the solution standardized data definitions across four agencies.  The number of transaction types that needed to be supported initially went from 700 to 350.  After further adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture, the number of transactions needed was reduced to below 150.

This solution enabled the State to realize its vision to offer a ‘one-stop shopping’ platform for law enforcement agencies.  The solution provided the State with a modern platform that  significantly reduced maintenance costs and improved information design and that could be enhanced to integrate other justice applications and information exchanges without dependencies on vendor products.  The solution supports multiple data representation models and protocols, and services are available through multiple channels for internal and external agency applications.  In addition to simplified access to integrated information, the State will reduce their total cost of ownership since future service development costs are lowered, and other channels may immediately reuse services.