Sample White Paper

Large-Scale Information Sharing

Architecture

“Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

Architecture is a blending of form and function that helps define our civilization. Whether it is on the scale of a private residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, or the design and layout of entire cities such as Washington, DC or Paris, architecture has the power to inspire us. It can change how we perceive the world. It can even make the world around us work better.

Information Technology (IT) also has an architecture shaping its conceptual structure and logical organization. And there is much discussion of how IT architectures operate in the micro world to make our everyday world function better. Much of that discussion, however, takes place in the narrowly-focused world of the IT departments of large organizations.

Helping an IT shop work better is a good idea, but there are now significant and growing pressures on public agencies to share information across organizations on an unprecedented scale. From our justice system, through health and human services organizations, people want those agencies to use the new information technologies to provide better, more complete and uninterrupted services.

People do not want criminals to evade justice by exploiting the boundaries of police agencies.
This paper outlines, in non-technical terms, an architecture broadly aimed at sharing information externally, across multiple Justice agencies with common goals or interests.

In the past when agencies needed to share information, they picked up the phone and talked informally to each other. For major cases, they got together in a room and shared their paper files. Sharing information was labor-intensive, and controlled by the person or agency that owned the files. If they did not want to share, or if a file was “checked out,” then nobody else could use that information. And if the file was misplaced or misfiled, it could disappear for a time – sometimes even permanently.

This way of sharing information also depended on one of the parties recognizing the need to share based on their own particular requirements. Because it was so narrowly focused, this form of sharing made it unlikely that agencies would combine information to draw a conclusion beyond the scope of the original inquiry.

For example, an individual who is a suspect in a major crime in one jurisdiction may be arrested in another one. That jurisdiction might release the suspect if the arrest was for a minor charge, without knowing about the major charge. Or a parole board, concerned about the social environment of a recently released person, is interested that a family member has been arrested.

Today, information technologies make that kind of cross-agency sharing both feasible and affordable. In most cases it can be done without major investments in new operational systems.

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www.sierra-systems.com/documents/library/justice/justice%20whitepaper.pdf