Over the years, justice agencies have invested in numerous technologies to manage and control information. The widespread and uncoordinated nature of these investments has left key information assets scattered, isolated, and inaccessible to people, applications and processes. In order to optimize their decision-making capabilities, justice agencies need a flexible software architecture that can bridge the gaps between these information pockets or silos and securely deliver and retrieve information on demand.
This white paper will discuss some of the technological barriers to integrated information sharing. It will also introduce and explain Service-Oriented Architecture, its benefits, and how it can be used to facilitate enhanced information sharing.
In today’s justice environment, success increasingly depends on the timely and secure exchange of information. Crime knows no boundaries, and important case information is often spread across databases maintained by various agencies. If this disparate data were fully integrated, justice and law enforcement officials would be much more effective in both preventing crime and solving open cases.
Many obstacles are encountered, however, on the road to successful data integration. For many years, justice agencies have developed or invested in software independently of one another. While these software packages are usually very similar and have the same basic functionality, they often use unique technology that makes them incompatible. Without any kind of common ground to facilitate communication between systems, it is impossible for them to exchange data electronically. Consequently, justice agencies often have to resort to archaic and extremely inefficient methods of delivering information to each other, such as manually entering data into multiple databases or delivering hard copies of reports via the postal service.
As a result of these technological barriers, organziations often store data in information silos (i.e. information packages that are isolated from outside systems). While it is possible to bridge the gaps between silos by creating an interface for the two software systems that they’re operating under, doing so requires an in-depth understanding of both systems, as well as a large investment of time, money and other resources. Even when such interfaces are created, they are extremely inflexible and only serve as one-to-one solutions (i.e. they will only function in the role that they were originally built for).