The walls are slowly crumbling
The advent of XML and web services has stirred the ambition of many governmental agencies to find ways for their computers to exchange information with other agencies. Driven by budget reductions, and public criticism of governmental inefficiency, most government agencies are at least thinking about a paradigm shift in which they would actually share information.
The Department of Justice has been a leader in this exploration, and with its nurturing the development of the Global Justice XML Data Model has set a tone for other governmental thinking about information sharing. State and local justice agencies have been most agressive in driving for integration in many areas, and states have outpaced the Federal government in moving forward to provide ways to make all agencies more efficient.
The Federal government practically invented the notion of stovepipe systems, and cultural, political, and cost considerations have kept the walls very high and prohibited moving very far toward effective information sharing. But the last few years has seen considerable progress toward figuring out the standards and the methods that need to be deployed to make this easier. An XML Working Group let by Owen Ambur at the Department of Interior and Lee Ellis at GSA has been at work and documents its discussions and work products for all to see. This site has a lot of great presentations on the state of the art in this field.
Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace, Inc., reports on a recent meeting of the XML Working Group on her TechnoFlak blog, and also includes a slew of interesting and useful links to explanatory information about the topic.
What is almost unbelievable is that the Federal government is working very hard to clean up its own problems of interoperability and simultaneously thinking ahead about extending information sharing to state and local agencies. The Department of Justice Law Enforcement Information Sharing project is designed from the beginning to take into account the work of the Global Advisory Committee's proposed National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan which the Attorney General has endorsed and which calls for a coordinating council heavily influenced by state and local police agencies. The baseline for sharing will be the work created by the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative of the Office of Justice Programs in DOJ.
The skeptical among us who have labored so long on this vision of information exchange without the constraints of jurisdictional protectionism may argue that all of this will take decades to come to pass. I'd just like to point out that we have been working on integrated justice information systems for more than 3 decades, and the relative progress in the last 3 or so years has been the equivalent of getting off the horse and buggy and jumping into a jet plane. We may still have a long journey but we're getting there a whole lot faster.
8:59:11 PM 
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