Architectural Agreement

The vision of ICJIS is "to enhance public safety, improve service to the community, and promote quality justice and law enforcement decision-making by sharing information that is timely, secure, reliable and comprehensive." When Bernosky joined ICJIS, he knew achieving those objectives would be fraught with hurdles. Each of the five criminal justice agencies had its own IT department, as well as unique hardware, systems, databases and operating systems. Each agency had built its systems with no overarching view toward building an integrated architecture. "From an IT perspective, they pretty much operated autono- mously," says Bernosky.

In addition to the technological challenges, there were political challenges that immediately reared their ugly heads. The agencies squabbled over who should develop the plan. "It was perceived that any county organization?the county CIO, a justice agency, even ICJIS?would have a bias toward some technology or architecture direction that would benefit them and make it difficult for the others," Bernosky says.

To resolve that issue, the agencies decided to bring in an outside broker to referee the process. In early 2001, ICJIS hired Emerald Solutions, an IT consultancy in Portland, Ore., to develop a plan. Later that spring, Emerald delivered its report, which assessed the IT infrastructures of each agency, came up with a set of integration requirements and architecture options, and offered a list of recommendations. That list became the basis for the new architecture upon which ICJIS and the five agencies agreed.

The agency decided on a J2EE development environment with a middleware layer for data and an EAI system called Cloverleaf (purchased from Healthcare.com, which was later bought by Quovadx). ICJIS uses IBM’s Websphere for developing Web applications, partly because Bernosky doesn’t have many Java engineers on his staff, and he couldn’t afford new ones.

To Collect and to Protect

One of the first major projects Bernosky and his staff began tackling in summer 2001 is called the common case number (CCN) system. Previously, the different agencies assigned multiple numbers to the same criminal cases. The result was confusion for victims, witnesses and attorneys; delays in case processing; and an added layer of complexity to the case flow process. With the CCN system, justice agencies enter information electronically in real-time, which decreases errors and expedites processing.

Before developing the CCN system, ICJIS did extensive mapping of the criminal justice process, which includes investigation, detention, initial appearance, probable cause determination, arraignment, trial and sentencing, just to name a few. Within each of those major processes are numerous other processes. The agency concluded that assigning a common case number to every case would help eliminate confusion, streamline the justice process, reduce errors and facilitate consistent case tracking.