State of Iowa & URL Integration Partner to Implement First Statewide, SOA & GRA-Based CJIS System

May 23, 2011 - PRLog -- DENVER, Colorado (May 23, 2011) – URL Integration, an IT consulting company providing system integration services to justice and public safety agencies, officially announces its long‐standing partnership with the State of Iowa in the planning and implementation of the first statewide Criminal Justice Information Sharing (CJIS) initiative. This initiative involves a loosely coupled, end‐to‐end Service‐Oriented Architecture (SOA) that heavily promotes interoperability and business agility through the strict use of Global Reference Architecture (GRA) and both Web services and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standards, including National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

URL first began working with the State of Iowa in 2002, providing business process re‐engineering and governance support, strategic planning, and overall project direction to state and local stakeholders in order to establish project consensus and sound planning efforts. In 2007, URL became the State of Iowa’s chosen systems integrator to implement and deploy the state‐wide CJIS initiative. This ongoing project, which first went live in February 2008, was implemented with URL’s full‐scale, end‐to‐end GRA solution and now successfully encompasses 24 information exchanges that transmit over 600,000 messages on a yearly basis.

URL’s Full Scale, End‐to‐End Service‐Oriented Architecture (SOA)
There are several aspects of URL’s end‐to‐end SOA approach to justice information sharing environments that sets it apart from other system integrators, including blending jurisdiction‐wide, business processes with firm standards‐based SOA architecture, as manifested in the GRA. This proven‐approach ensures information moves – real-time – across multiple agencies to automate the criminal justice process. With the State of Iowa’s CJIS project, URL’s end‐to‐end approach considered the following elements:
    -   Statewide Strategic Planning and Governance: In the State of Iowa, the CJIS initiative incorporated business processes and multiple exchanges from 11 State Agencies and Judicial Branch, 99 County Attorneys and Sheriffs, and more than 200 Municipal Law Enforcement Agencies.
    -   Standards‐Based Architecture: URL’s implementation method included a clean application of SOA with a unique and firm combination of GRA, Web services, and XML standards, including NIEM.
    -   Cross‐Agency Automation: From law enforcement incident all the way through disposition and post‐disposition, URL considered the entire criminal justice enterprise in order to automate the horizontal flow of information and real‐time exchanges, with no batches, file transfer protocol (FTP), or extracting, transferring, and loading (ETL).
    -   Workflow‐Driven Processes: To ensure information moves seamlessly throughout the criminal justice process, URL supported the ability for the user to input information once into a system to promote workflow efficiencies in various business processes.
    -   Event‐Triggered Integration: With event‐triggered integration, URL ensures information exchange automates upon the occurrence of specific, pre‐defined events that touch sending agency’s system of record and are integrated into the receiving agency’s systems and business processes.
    -   Loosely Coupled Environment: Implementing a loosely coupled architecture allows the integration layer to sit above all legacy systems. This approach provides maximum flexibility so when upgrades and changes need to be made to an agency’s internal system, it won’t disrupt or break the integration process.

“The approach to justice integration taken by the State of Iowa and URL is groundbreaking and all-encompassing in the long‐term support of an improved justice workflow in Iowa,” says Dave Usery, URL Integration’s President and CEO. “URL’s end‐to‐end GRA solution considers the complete use of standards and an enterprise‐wide implementation of the entire justice system in Iowa. There are no short cuts to this work and the standards and architecture must stay pure to maximize how they work together. At URL, we work very closely with our clients to capture as much of the business process, intelligence, and function – performed by people in the paper world – into the service layer so that rich insight and experience is automated. Many system integrators and vendors advertise that a large percentage of the integration work is data mapping, but we’ve found that to be a significant oversimplification of this work.”

To date, the State of Iowa’s CJIS initiative supports workflow‐driven information sharing among 11 State agencies and the Judicial Branch, 99 County Attorneys and Sheriffs, and an additional 200+ local law enforcement agencies in the State of Iowa. By the end of 2012, the CJIS initiative will be feeding incident, arrest, and booking information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Data Exchange (N‐DEx) project.

“The work the State of Iowa has undertaken to promote criminal justice information sharing is visionary, comprehensive, and the first of its kind,” says Dave Usery, URL‘s President and CEO. “While there are a number of factors behind the project’s success, two primary features are the leadership of the project stakeholders and their commitment to using URL’s end‐to‐end GRA approach. Project leaders in Iowa have a firm commitment to providing real‐time, transactional information exchange to support and improve the administration of justice in the State, and realized that the GRA, justice standards, and accompanying technologies were the best, most economical platform on which to build and continue to grow that vision. The State of Iowa has achieved something special that sets itself apart from the others, and URL Integration is proud to have played a role in that success."

ABOUT URL INTEGRATION
URL Integration is an award‐winning IT consulting company specializing in the planning and implementation of complex, integrated exchange projects. We set ourselves apart from our competition by leveraging and implementing emerging technologies, industry best practices, proven methodologies, and justice standards. Our goal is to improve cross‐agency collaboration and business performance by establishing real‐time and automated information exchanges. To learn more about URL, visit
www.urlintegration.com.

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URL Integration is an award-winning IT consulting company specializing in the planning and implementation of complex, information exchange projects for justice and public safety agencies.