The IJIS Factor

May 14, 2012. Two kids grew up working on totally different skill sets and, understandably, developed radically different approaches to meet their objective.

The first kid was about the notion of searching the rows and columns of databases, learning to create keys that made it possible to very quickly find the rows that contained the data matching the inquiry made across the columns. We called this kid the expert on structured data searching. Data that is well ordered, and built in accordance with rules that described internal relationships, called upon us to find higher and higher speed searches of structured databases, most of which were designed in accordance with the rules defined for the Structured Query Language (SQL).

The other kid came along later and was more about sloppy piles of words, figuring out how to make sense of unconnected, undisciplined, unstructured data (e.g. words, pictures, videos, etc.), regardless of format (e.g. webpage, email, book, movie, etc.). The only rule for the unstructured data was that it had to be accessible to find anything. We called this kid the search engine, and the kid grew to amazing capacities to search billions of web pages and other sources of unstructured data.

But now that we are collecting enough data to choke a planet, we are not happy until these kids start working together to make their searches additive. Enterprise search, as we sometimes call it, is about simultaneously searching structured and unstructured data to find associations regarding a common query object. The “Holy Grail” here is in finding technologies that will take advantage of the kinds of web search engines that can find a thimble in a gazillion stores with the structured and disciplined search of relational databases. Because the relational databases are not as facile with very large data and with unstructured data, we have invented new ways to store data and search repositories with tools like Hadoop and its associated resources.

To apply the exciting new enterprise search tools to justice and public safety, a new mindset is required. The requirements for searching all forms of digitized information and extracting patterns and meaning have not been well defined. Part of the problem is that most public officials are as yet unaware of the powerful new enterprise search engines that many new companies have built. Recently, companies like HP and Oracle have purchased some of these start-ups and will be engaged in applying their tools to this market.

There was a study done a long time ago that came to the conclusion that police agencies did indeed have something like 90% of the information that they needed to solve crimes; however, they could not find the information since it was buried in so many places inside the typical police department. As a result, clearances have remained much lower than perhaps they might have been if we put in place the kind of enterprise search engine that would go through all the archives to find what is known about a crime, a pattern, or a potential disturbance.

For these tools to work in public safety, they will have to be combined with the technology for federated queries, where we empower analysts and officers to search far beyond their own enterprise, to find the correlating information contained in parallel systems in justice and public safety agencies in the next county or across the nation.

The kids have grown up to show that they are indeed related—now they need to play nice together and work toward a synergistic end.

May 7, 2012. It seems like part way into any given new year, the pundits and the prognosticators declare that this is the year of the [pick your own favorite trend]. As we began 2012, there were lots of people contending that this was the year of the cloud, so cloud computing was going to be the big thing for 2012. There are two things wrong with this habit.

First, technology is changing so fast that almost nothing can be in the forefront of people’s minds for a whole year. A few years ago, the CEO of Hewlett Packard noted that in the whole prior HP fiscal year 90% of what they sold was not on their price list at the beginning of the year. We’re moving even faster than that now.

Second, in the commercial and consumer worlds, there is no longer a question about cloud computing coming into play – it’s already there. Even the federal government seems to be moving fast to implement computing in the cloud. Although there are still issues with this technology in justice and public safety, it is more about how we do it than if we do it. The IJIS Institute is in the middle of a study to define the concerns law enforcement executives have about moving to the cloud for mission critical applications, and documenting ways to mitigate the collective concerns. With all of this forward motion, it seems anticlimactic to claim that this is the year of the cloud.

There does appear to be a rapidly growing market segment in the state and local world that might get tagged with the “This Is the Year” title. In all facets of local government, but particularly in public safety and related service areas, there is a very significant rate of adoption of smart phone applications. While “There’s an app for that” is hardly a new phrase, the over 800,000 iPhone apps alone have mostly been for consumer personal purposes and not for government; however, this year you can find hundreds of new apps either already released or in development that are either for assisting police or other government services or related to what used to be called “e-government.” Apple has now paid over $4 billion to app developers and the rate is rapidly increasing as government buys into the app world – even though a lot of the government apps are developed and made available free of any cost.

So we might be tempted to assert that “This Is the Year of the App,” at least for government service; however, there is no assurance that something else will not preoccupy our minds before this year is even out. As a result, I am inclined to conclude that no new technology can claim to be the foremost thing in our sights and worth a year of our attention.

It is still good to recognize a major trend, and to figure out how it will be sustained and what energy should be invested in joining such a trend. Even with the blockbuster adoption of apps by consumers, there is a new problem inhibiting their adoption in government. As Colin Wood writes in Government Technology, the real value proposition for smartphone apps is to be discovered in the way they integrate with the remainder of the enterprise. To put it another way, the successful apps will be those that understand the need to hook up with a back end that will make the information sharing created by this new technology useful across the enterprise.

Apps built either for government personnel to help them do their assigned tasks or for citizens to use in communicating and receiving service needs have to interact with databases and systems that perform services beyond the capabilities of mobile devices. The users of apps that are not well integrated into the enterprise information system may find the initial euphoria about the slick user interface to be short-lived if the apps don’t deliver their ultimate promise of information into the hands of the user.

As the use of smartphone apps matures in the government world, there will be more professional software engineers and companies that work in these fields to ensure the apps are well integrated, have appropriate security and privacy controls, and manage such tedious tasks of provisioning, updates, etc. When this day comes, we will see an even greater acceptance of this exciting new technology and another step toward empowering the service professional on the street where he or she lives.

Maybe this will become “The Year of the App” …

May 1, 2012. Long-term Evolution (LTE) is well entrenched in the commercial smartphone and broadband world, with multiple offerings of phones and modems; however, unfortunately, the public safety market usually takes a while to mature to catch up with the commercial world – maybe it never really catches up at all. One of the indicators of the reliable arrival of new technology in public safety is when Motorola refreshes its product line to endorse a particular technology. It is also the case that when Motorola rolls out a powerful new technology, there is a serious chance it will have a significant operational impact.

Motorola was experimenting with radio in police cars in the 1930s but announced its first real 2-way police mobile radio circa 1940. When this happened, the world of police patrol was changed forever. Gone was the reliance on the old way of doing things where officers had to get to the call box private telephone system to find out their next assignment. This simple announcement of 2-way mobile police radio led to random and, eventually, directed patrol strategies.

And now Motorola has fully acknowledged and made credible the application of LTE to the public safety field. With an extensive suite of products and services—much the same as the way that Motorola became entrenched in the roll out of digital trunked radio, which became the system of desire for most agencies—Motorola is basing its market capture on having ruggedized mobile devices coupled with broadband LTE private networks or a private cloud (whichever you prefer) to offer a total broadband, LTE-based, mobile data capability to your public safety agency.

LEX 700 Mission Critical Handheld

In typical thorough and smart Motorola engineering, the newly announced LEX 700 Mission Critical Handheld is clearly reflective of the reality of how public safety uses and treats its mobile devices—that is, it is ruggedized for daily use and realistically recognizes what faces such devices in the hands of public safety officers. Beyond the consistent standards of Motorola design history, the device incorporates all of the technology anyone might want in such a device – from an 8 megapixel camera, video, mapping, apps for public safety, and far-reaching connectivity to the local private LTE public safety network, or lesser generations, including even WiFi. And what Motorola has not already included, it makes possible with a development environment for third parties.

You won’t find language in the Motorola pages about this being a smartphone, but it sure appears to provide a lot of the functionality that commercial consumer smartphones have pioneered. (Since Motorola was indeed a pioneer in both the cellphone and smartphone markets, this is not surprising.) In my opinion, the LEX 700 Mission Critical Handheld deserves to be identified as a public safety smartphone.

Combining this offering with a full service capability to implement a private or hosted LTE network indeed makes the whole LTE introduction to public safety a reality. With all of the concerns about service not being available from the cellphone carriers in serious emergencies, Motorola has carried on its primary mission of providing for communications without tying public safety personnel to the vagaries of public networks. Motorola is clearly aiming at the $7.5 billion that was authorized with the award of the D-block to public safety, thereby giving public safety 20MHz of bandwidth that will be supported in nationwide LTE implementations. It’s good that Motorola is playing to this market, as it already adds credibility to the implementation of LTE and the availability of broadband capabilities to public safety.

This is innovation at its finest – taking the most advanced technologies and putting them to use to serve public safety. Many more innovative products and services will be developed to take advantage of this new broadband capability and, in the end, these moves forward will serve the public well.

April 23, 2012. As I travel around the country and attend various law enforcement and justice functions, I have frequently been amazed at how many people are unaware of the many helpful products that have been developed by the Global (Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative) Advisory Committee (GAC) to the Attorney General. The GAC has also become aware of the lack of understanding and awareness of its many work products related to improving information sharing in the justice and law enforcement community. Thanks to the hard work of its Outreach committee, chaired by Ron Hawley, Executive Director of SEARCH Group, Inc., there is now a very interesting and useful portal available to find the reference information on any of the Global work products and their current status and relevance to improving information sharing.

Global has now introduced a Global Wizard that provides access to the Global Information Sharing Toolkit, covering all of the publications developed by and in support of information sharing. Through this portal, there are a very intelligent set of filters defined to limit the search to specific areas of interest and applicability, resulting in a set of results that can be further perused.

The wizard is carefully designed to directly guide the user to products of interest. Through the use of the filters, keywords and other time-saving search parameters, users can search the toolkit for those documents and guidelines of interest and then go directly through the many hyperlinks to view documents, podcasts, and other materials relevant. There is even a guided search section where phrases can be clicked like this one: “I want a review of the operational policies and procedures that govern the basic operation of a federation for trusted information sharing.” With only one click, the user is taken to the most relevant section of the toolkit to then permit further scanning, downloading or perusing as appropriate.

The work products of Global form the fundamental framework for moving forward with information sharing in the justice and law enforcement world. The availability of standards, guidelines and best practices documented by Global in the work of its very informed committees and task forces will remain the best advice to both agencies and industry participants in the work of improving information sharing. The Global work has influenced special conditions on grants, funding programs, and new courses of action for all agencies in improving information sharing.

Now, with this portal, it should be easy for anyone to find the relevant and useful Global product documentation to inform a project team or an executive in the justice field. It is now incumbent upon professional associations and industry partners to spread the word about this most useful tool to the gateway to information sharing standards.

April 18, 2012. One of the early uses of computers in the police field was to generate the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). In order to do so, the early adopters of computer technology created a computerized repository of the data on hand-written police reports that needed to be entered in order to calculate the Return A and other forms that became part of UCR. Because the purpose of these early systems was just to serve UCR, they often did not automate such things as the narrative portion of the crime report.

Then, when it became possible to search these files, people started thinking about using the system for investigative purposes. Often, a new and separate set of computer files was created that had much more data including M.O. and other useful factors, and maybe a master name index to link records together.

Now, with a great deal of hindsight, we are very aware of the principle that building an automated system should only be done with the intent of having a single system handle as many tasks as possible. There is no good reason to build separate systems that require duplicate data entry regardless of how many stovepipe systems have to be fed data. One of the frequent and vocal complaints of police, fire and EMS officials is that there are too many times when the same data has to be entered to serve multiple systems. But there are still RFPs issued for single purposes that either ignore or are ignorant of other needs that could  be served by the same processes and systems already built.

One of my colleagues at the IJIS Institute has analyzed all the potential “customers” for police incident reports and has been able to identify 21 separate potential output deliverables that could use the same incident report. Think about who needs or wants a copy—all the internal users, such as the investigator, and external users, such as the victim, attorneys, insurance agent, FBI, the press, etc. If you were undertaking the task of creating a new incident based reporting system, why wouldn’t you try to define the outputs that would serve all of these potential users and then design the processes and software to serve them all with the same data or a subset thereof?

One of the important purpose sharing principles is that data collected and automated for support of operational functions such as investigations should also be the source for generating statistics about the work. Systems intended for investigative support might be created without any discipline introduced by careful edit routines, but simply by paying attention to the needs for the kind of discipline and integrity needed to generate statistics – the same system can serve both needs. And, given our increased desire and capacity to share incident data across jurisdictional boundaries, and the consequent increased emphasis on data quality and integrity that naturally results from more widespread exposure of reports, the inclusion of good edit rules will do nothing but help improve report quality and accuracy. Furthermore, the crime classification process necessary to determine the right offense codes and counting rules supports an increased consistency and utility of the reports in their investigative and prosecutorial use.

In other words, having gone to the trouble of following proper discipline in data entry serves both statistical and operational needs while avoiding duplicate data entry. Why would we build systems any other way?

April 10, 2012. Every person, business, and government organization that uses a computer or the internet is a potential victim of cybercrime. The crime can be from a computer intrusion, stalking, a predator, identity theft, fraudulent claims, or many other ways that technology can hurt us. People, most notably children and the elderly, can be persuaded to put themselves in harm’s way by solicitous invitations in e-mail or chat rooms. Physical injury or death, emotional trauma, and financial ruin can be the consequences of cybercrime. Computers and the internet can be the tools of destruction.

Cybercrime is getting a lot of attention at all levels of government, but it is amazing how little we really know about it. In an article in MIT’s Technology Review, Erica Naone reports that:

“Patrick Peterson, chief security researcher at Cisco, has estimated that losses totaled $560 million in 2009. Killian Strauss of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has estimated them at $100 billion annually. And in March 2009, Edward Amoroso, AT&T’s chief security officer, submitted written testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation estimating that cybercrime was bringing in illicit revenues of approximately $1 trillion a year.”

In other words, we don’t have a clue.

The Norton Cybercrime Report says that the total cost of cybercrime in the past year was $388 billion, more than the cost of the combined market for marijuana, cocaine, and heroin (estimated at $288 billion).

You might think that with all the focus on cybercrime we would have a better set of statistics about it. You might expect that the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) would have up-to-date statistics on the amount and types of cybercrime so that we could understand what we are facing. Unfortunately, the only contribution that BJS has to offer on this topic is the National Computer Security Survey and the latest report posted on the BJS website covers cybercrime against businesses in the year 2005.

Then you might speculate that if BJS doesn’t have this information, then surely the FBI would gather the statistics since it has taken such aggressive action against cybercrime. But a quick search brings you to the FBI’s Cyber Crime page, where there are a lot of good stories and advice but no statistics other than links to the UCR and other pages that are indirectly related.

The joint FBI/National White Collar Crime Center’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reports that in 2010 it received 300,000 complaints, or about 25,000 per month. But this is self-reported, and we know from the survey work that these crimes are among the most underreported. Companies hesitate to report hacking to avoid scaring customers, and individuals are embarrassed by succumbing to internet scams and frauds. In the absence of solid statistics on the amount of cybercrime, exaggerations abound. In Richard Clarke’s book CyberWar, he describes a number of scenarios that are potentially frightening but not necessarily plausible. There are lots of great suggestions in Clarke’s book, but we have no way of understanding the threats he defines by way of actual statistical information.

But, in the absence of data, there still is a gut level need for action. And so, the relatively new cybersecurity czar at the White House recently unveiled the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative to describe national strategies. At the same meeting in early March 2012, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced to the highly technical audience that, although the current FBI priority was terrorism, “in the not too-distant-future we anticipate that the cyberthreat will pose the greatest threat to our country.” The FBI is already retooling to attack this threat, and building the capacity internally and with partners in government to be able to respond.

Since we don’t really know how to define cybercrime, or don’t agree on how to do it, and since we don’t know how much there is and what are its characteristics, it’s hard to even get started. But this much is certain: There will be more and more cybercrime as criminals learn how to further exploit these vulnerabilities in our systems and in the natural weaknesses of humans. The longer we wait to get moving on this emerging new challenge to a free society, the harder it will become to effectively limit its continued penetration into our lives. Our response must be a lot more than just training detectives in computer forensics—we have to explore strategies that attack financial channels and organizational structures just as we have begun to do with jihadist cells. Nothing short of a full press on cybercrime will suffice.

April 2, 2012. Dave Roberts at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) called to our attention an article in the New York Times about the widespread use of cell phones by police to find people and for various other investigative purposes. The article entitled “Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool,” by Eric Lichtblau, describes an ACLU national study on the use of cell phones by police and suggests that there significant privacy issues inherent in this broad use of cell phone information. The article quotes Catherine Crump, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who coordinated the group’s gathering of police records, as saying that “…advances in technology are rapidly outpacing the state of the law.”

Technology has pushed so far ahead of the policies embodied in both Federal and state statutes governing privacy and civil rights that the existing legislation is no longer sufficient to provide good guidance on how to handle privacy issues. Police officials who care about doing the right thing—and this includes most modern police officials everywhere—cannot find guidance in either the Federal law or their state laws and administrative regulations. Their only recourse is to use their own judgment and essentially guess at what the courts might do after the fact. Risk-adverse executives often want to just avoid using the technology where there is no policy guidance, but the potential of many of today’s modern tools is too great to ignore.

The IACP has faced this problem head on with respect to the use of Automatic License Plate Reader systems, where there has been and is still controversy about how long police can keep data on LPR databases and about the potential uses of such information. But this difficult issue is only a drop in the bucket of the many technological innovations now in use and coming down the road that will raise even more challenges to the issues of government use of private information. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled against the police use of GPS tracking devices deployed without a current court approved warrant.

There are active discussions that have been going on the past year or more regarding the allowable police use of social networking information from such sites as Facebook and MySpace. Police that use information from these sites for the purpose of generating investigative leads are hesitant to bring the information into the courts for fear that the court will disallow such information as an invasion of privacy. Given that no state or Federal statute clarifies the acceptable use of this information for investigative purposes, we are stuck in the realm of trial and error when it comes to deploying new technology without such policy guidance.

Part of the problem is that technology changes faster than the legislative process can handle. The deliberations about privacy and civil rights and the need for a reasoned discourse that takes into account all stakeholders are not happening fast and are clearly slower than the speed of innovation. The only answer would seem to be to get started on writing new laws that take technological change into account without being narrowly addressed at specific technological developments. It may be easier said than done, but such a technology-independent but technology-aware view of today’s issues reflected in the law would do a great service for the public, as well as for the law enforcement community.

March 26, 2012. In the late 1990s, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) conducted a series of focus groups of justice practitioners on the general topic of information technology and the needs of the field. The overwhelming outcry of these focus groups was that the various systems previously implemented were not compatible and could not exchange information, leading to duplicate data entry as the normal behavior rather than being the exception.

Early efforts to apply computer technology to support operational processes generally led to what are now called “silos” or “stovepipes.” Such systems are labeled in this way because they do not work together well in exchanging information or because they end up being so organization-centric that there is no easy way to extract and re-use data that has been previously entered, leading to an enormous amount of redundant data entry. For some years now, the antidote to such designs has been to persuade system designers to think about “enterprise” information systems, in which the information system serves all components of the enterprise and minimizes redundant data entry while protecting data integrity.

To apply this thinking to the criminal justice world, it becomes essential to clearly define what constitutes the “enterprise.” Is it the individual agency (police, prosecutor, court, corrections agency) or is there a definition of the enterprise that covers all such participants in the administration of justice? It is not simply a question of defining stakeholders? The information exchanges have to be defined and given meaning in the architecture of the system or there will inevitably be controversy and criticism, as well as significant waste. We have come, particularly under the influence of the Global Reference Architecture (GRA), to think of these exchanges as services to be shared and then of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that provides a framework for their interaction.

The first national call to consider the criminal justice system as the enterprise in conceiving the idea of linking the various component disciplines intelligently came from the Task Force Report of the President’s crime commission in 1967¹. It was argued in this report that the various components of the justice system were linked by their common focus on the offender, and by the fact that the processes underlying law enforcement and the administration of justice were a series of connected steps of the administration of justice. To any reasonable practitioner, the use of the word “system” implies a much stronger relationship than actually exists, and in no way can the criminal justice system be construed by any engineering definition of the term to actually be a system; however, it remains true that the product of various stages of arrest, prosecution, adjudication, and supervision rely on the output of prior processes to define their workload, and it is certainly true that data collected in earlier processes can support many subsequent transactions.

So if we take the meaning of the word “enterprise” to imply a collection of processes and people organized around common purposes, then it is completely accurate to have a mental construct of the criminal justice system as an enterprise. Under this construction, decisions about the design and implementation of an enterprise information system can be based on this concept. We can then confidently address the exchanges between the criminal justice enterprise and other enterprise systems (e.g. public health emergency management, international trade, etc.) and then begin to truly identify and document what we mean by the edge of the enterprise.

Note 1—Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, Report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) at 207; Task Force Report: Criminal Justice System (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967).

March 19, 2012. When I first became engaged in managing the development of new software including computer-aided dispatch systems (CAD) and records management systems (RMS) for law enforcement agencies, I was totally fired up about building a better mousetrap—making it more user-friendly, functional, faster, and better than the competition. It was a long time before I realized that I never asked myself why I was building this software in the first place. Most technologically-oriented professionals are so enticed by the challenge of product improvement using the latest technology that they (we) forget to postulate a theory of change that would explain more clearly what value we were adding.

In these days of tight budgets and exploding technological revolutions, it is no longer possible to escape this question. Public agencies and their funding bodies want to know what the theory of change is that is the rationale for introducing new technology or even for upgrading legacy systems. What value to the community will arise from such an implementation? The theory of change is what introduces clear system objectives, and what makes possible the design of measures of success. In every case, there is a hypothesis to be tested, and the results of the testing are what establish the value to the community. When the cost is small, there are many who just overlook this need, and proceed anyway; however, as we increase the cost for technology and major upgrades, the citizenry and the governing bodies who are spending the money want to know—and have a right to know—the return on investment in meaningful terms.

The theory of change can be about improving effectiveness (functionality or performance) or efficiency, and there are lots of ways to postulate the appropriate theory. Years ago, the city of Jacksonville went to great lengths to show that their implementation of a CAD saved the equivalent of 10% of the patrol force just by designing better beats and reducing travel times. Acquiring today’s sophisticated predictive analytic tools to support place-based policing strategies can clearly lead to preventing crime, as well as to increasing clearance rates.

Articulating a clear theory of change is the most effective starting point to think through project objectives, measures of success, and features of a system. It is the key way for project managers and administrators with project oversight to keep the team’s eye on the ball, and to limit the changes that so often migrate into the minds of the management. But an even better argument for taking this approach is that the theory of change will strongly influence the design and even the coding of the developers building software for any given implementation. If the theory is related to doing something faster, better or cheaper, then the development will be strongly influenced by these notions. One can take this down to a very specific level. If the theory of change for the new CAD system is to improve response time by ensuring that the computer delivers its responses in sub-second times, then the developer will build the code to do so. If time is of little or no consequence, then a much easier and less responsive method will always be likely.

In the end, the public will be more impressed by an agency and its service provider having a clear theory of change and implementing technology to achieve the desired change. They might even find the funding to make it happen.

What’s your theory?

March 5, 2012. As Robert Frost continues to remind us, we have “miles to go before we sleep” when it comes to there being full information sharing just within the domain of the law enforcement and justice community. But we might see even more powerful rewards as we begin to introduce a strong capacity to share information across communities of interest. We are only beginning to build a bridge, for example, between the justice and health and human services worlds—and there are so many intersections of these worlds where a solid and enduring pattern of information sharing might have tremendous impact. The intersections are plentiful.

Just to excite the imagination a bit, there have been research projects that tell us teaching a single mother to read might have a greater effect on crime reduction than any other single program. Studies have shown that children whose mothers read to them are less likely to become engaged in a life of crime. Experts on juvenile violence have speculated that better information sharing between law enforcement, schools, and social services about the signs of potential violence in troubled youth might allow us to prevent some of the school shootings we have experienced throughout the country. Creating innovative ways to address narcotics and dangerous drug addiction problems certainly require collaboration between substance abuse programs and law enforcement, as well as other social service agencies. Reducing recidivism rates by doing a better job of handling offender re-entry into the community requires a community effort of justice and human services to be successful.

It is intuitively obvious that information sharing is at the heart of any of these collaborative efforts to attack a serious societal problem. It is also the case that these disparate agencies start from a position of distrusting any other component—so the willingness to share information has to be built upon a new paradigm of collaboration based on mutual trust and recognition that collaboration is essential. We have to accept the reality that no single agency is capable of having a significant success in dealing with the most important social issues of our time. Instead of drawing organization charts to formulate a solution to a social problem, we should be constructing the workflow in a process to which multiple organizations can contribute.

Cultural impediments are often cited as the obstacles to building trust and true collaboration, but it seems to me this is more than a cultural block. Leaders can decide to build bridges across the chasm of justice and health and human services regardless of the cultural shortcomings. It may take time, but companies and government organizations have shown they are quite capable of reinventing themselves once their leadership is convinced it is time to do so.

Technology won’t solve this problem of creating the will to change, but what we can do is make very sure the technology will support the information sharing once the organizational leadership opens the door to doing so by building the tools for information sharing, fostering standards-based innovation, considering the real production needs of all stakeholders on both ends of an exchange, and otherwise creating a state where, once there is a green light for information sharing, the technology will be ready and will, in fact, stimulate the exchange of information that is the infrastructure on which better decisions and policies can be made. Then we can build the bridge to somewhere useful.