NOWHERETOHIDE.ORG

Open letter to Mike Resnick, Sr. Director, Information Sharing Policy, EO of the President

I just finished reading of your appointment on the FederalNews Radio website. As you begin your review of the state of information sharing and the ISE, I would like to offer up some thoughts as someone who has been an information sharing evangelist for nearly a decade. here are seven points to consider:

1. Resist the urge to see information sharing as an outcome. Information sharing is a means to an end, not the end itself. Each federal agency, every state and regional fusion center, and all law enforcement intelligence units should have a clear set of information requirements, questions if you will, that information sharing and the intelligence process should work to answer–hold agencies accountable for having clear and valid requirements. This has been a common practice in the intelligence community for decades and should be a practice for all information sharing elements.
2. Build clear accountability into the information sharing process. Every federal agency, fusion center and law enforcement agency should have one person, preferably an impassioned, well-respected leader, that can ensure that their agencies requirements are  well documented and communicated horizontally across federal boundaries and vertically to local, state, and municipal agencies, and (where applicable) private sector organizations.
3. Establish clear linkage of information sharing to agency operational performance measures. Just as staffing, information technology, facilities, and utilities are seen as strategic resources in a performance-based budget, information sharing must be seen as a resource to be strategically used to help an agency achieve its mission. When measuring the success of information sharing, focus on the extent to which it helped achieve agency goals–just as counting cases in law enforcement is a misleading way to judge public safety success, counting RFIs, records shared, SARs submitted is not a good way to gauge information sharing success–successful information sharing can only be measured through the extent to which it helps agencies (at all levels) achieve their operational goals.
4. Discourage agencies from using stovepiped portals for information sharing. All shareable data should be available as a “service” for consumer agencies to ingest into their systems and not through a dedicated portal that users will need a discrete login to access. You can read my previous “Portal-mania” blog post for more detail here, but all federal agencies should be required to make their data accessible through National information Exchange Model (NIEM) based web services. This will enable consumer agencies to integrate multiple data streams into their workflow and will reduce the number of websites and portals analysts are required to access to perform their work.
5. Give the same amount of attention to what is shared and how it is shared. Over the last few years, a significant amount of effort has gone into how information is shared at the expense of understanding the depth and breadth of information actually being shared. Many regional and national information sharing efforts still only contain basic levels of information, or worse are just pointer systems that require additional human effort to gain access to the actual record. Encourage agencies to communicate to each other what specific information is being shared, and what is not being shared, and help everyone understand the consequences of their decisions.
6. Encourage maximum use of NIEM and the Information Exchange Package Descriptions (IEPD) contained it its clearinghouse. NIEM has emerged as the dictionary of shareable data elements. When you string together sets of these data elements to satisfy a specific business need, an IEPD is born. The NIEM IEPD clearinghouse contains more than 150 IEPDs, many of which apply to national security, law enforcement and public safety missions. While many federal agencies have pledged their support of NIEM, more effort is needed to ensure that they first seek to use IEPDs already contained in the clearinghouse and do not develop one-off IEPDs designed to meet very narrow applications.
7. Finally, foster a culture of transparency to help communicate an appreciation of personal civil rights and civil liberties.  All information sharing and intelligence operations should engage in proactive efforts to help alleviate any fears that individual privacy and liberties are violated by any of the actions taken by those agencies. In my September 3, 2009 blog posting I list ten questions a fusion center director should ask of their own intelligence operations. I’d like to offer up these questions as a beginning framework for any information sharing or intelligence operation. They also serve as a good framework for evaluating the extent to which information sharing and intelligence operations are in fact seriously working to do the right thing.

In closing, I hope you can see how these seven points help to frame how you might structure a results oriented evaluation of information sharing across our federal agencies and with our state and regional fusion center, and private sector partners. Taken together you will be able to report the extent to which agencies have:

• Documented their information sharing requirements – what needs to be shared;
• Someone who can be directly held accountable for effective and proper information sharing;
• Linked their need for information to specific operational goals and strategies;
• Implemented mechanisms that makes it easy for other agencies to access their information;
• Ensured that they are sharing the right information (most meaningful) information;
• Taken advantage of NIEM as a way to save money and expedite information sharing; and
• Taken measures to proactively diffuse public (and media) perceptions of information misuse.

I wish you well in your new role as Senior Director for Information Sharing Policy.

Regards,

Chuck Georgo
chuck@nowheretohide.org

NIEM and JIEM: Two Great Tastes In Justice Information Sharing

Remember the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial? “You got chocolate on my peanut butter “…”No, you got peanut butter on my chocolate “…?  Well, this is one of these stories…

It’s no secret, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is a huge success.  Not only has it been embraced horizontally and vertically for law enforcement information sharing at all levels of government, but it is now spreading internationally.  A check of the it.ojp.gov website lists more than 150 justice-related Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) based on NIEM–it’s been adopted by N-DEX, ISE-SAR, NCIC, IJIS PMIX, NCSC, OLLEISN, and many other CAD and RMS projects. 

For at least the last four years, Search.org has been maintaining the Justice Information Exchange Model (JIEM) developed by Search.org.  JIEM documents more than 15,000 justice information exchanges across  9 justice processes, 75 justice events, that affect 27 different justice agencies. 

So if JIEM establishes the required information exchanges required in the conduct of justice system business activities, and NIEM defines the syntactic and semantic model for the data elements within those justice information exchanges…then…

Wouldn’t it make sense for JIEM exchanges to call-out specific NIEM IEPDs?

And vice-versa, wouldn’t it make sense for NIEM IEPDs to identify the specific JIEM exchanges they correspond to?

Here’s a diagram that illustrates this…

Let me know what you think..

r/Chuck

chuck@nowheretohide.org - www.nowheretohide.org

Health Info Sharing Beating LE to the Punch

If you haven’t heard about the Department of Health and Human Services Federal Health Architecure and CONNECT project, I suggest you pop over to this website where documentation for version 2.0 of the software resides:

http://www.connectopensource.org/display/NHINR2/Release+2.0+Home

CONNECT is an open source software gateway that connects public and private health orgaizations to the National Health Information Network.  Think of it like a giant peer-to-peer N-DEx, but with an open source “front-porch” that drops into each agency and extracts the data from back-end systems.

I’ll be doing more investigation into the CONNECT project to see if we can adapt it for law enforcement information sharing use–the closest thing to this on the LEIS side is the FINDER project in orlando, FL.

as always, comments and thoughts welcomed.

r/Chuck

chuck@nowheretohide.org - www.nowheretohide.org

Information Sharing: When they say it's about the money, it's NOT about the money…

Some who read this may take it as a rant against agencies/providers who say we need more money for implementing law enforcement information sharing (LEIS), but in-fact, this post is really about understanding the landscape and influencing the choices and priorities of state and county policymakers and the affected law enforcement executives.

Let me first layout the agency landscape :

• There are about 14,000 state and local law enforcement agencies;
• In roughly 3,000 counties;
• That make up the 50 states of our great nation.

Now let’s layout the funding landscape:

• For 2008 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allocated $3,200,000,000 (billion) for state and local assistance grants;
• In that same year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made another $2,000,000,000 available;
• For 2008 that’s a total of $4,200,000,000;
• For 2007 that number was $4,500,000,000;
• For 2009, we are hoping that number stays about the same or goes even higher.
• To all these numbers you must add funding from the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, Department of Health and Human Services, or State funding sources for LEIS.

Finally, let me lay out the cost landscape for LEIS:

• In my eight or so years of experience of building and deploying LEIS, I’ve seen the costs associated with hooking up an agency to vary between $5,000 and $80,000 per record system connection;
• On average though, I feel the safer number is between about $20,000 and $40,000;
• For arguments sake, let’s use the high number of $40,000.

Now comes the fun part…let’s do some math…

• To be realistic, let’s say that 25% of the 14,000 agencies are already sharing information;
• That leaves about 10,000 agencies left to connect;
• At $40,000 an agency, we would need a total of $560,000,000 (Million);
• Divide that by the 3,000 counties, and we will need about $190,000 per county;
• If we do this over three years, that’s only $63,000 per county, per year for three years!

With (on average) every county getting about $1,400,000 every year for law enforcement and public safety (out of the $4.2 Billion allocated annualy), I would like to think that we (collectively) can see the benefits of LEIS enough to spare $63,000  a year for three years to get it done.

Here’s where the issue of choices and priorities comes in.  If we can agree that the money IS there, what we really need to work on are ways to convince the policymakers and law enforcement exectutives in those counties that investing a little in LEIS is a better investment than whatever it is their currently spending their part of the $4,200,000,000 on.  Do you agree?

I’d also like to know what role youthink the IACP, MCC and NSA would play here?

Thoughts and comments invited…and yes, I used a calculator…;-)

r/Chuck Georgo

What Gets Measured Gets Done…Using Evaluation to Drive Law Enforcmement Information Sharing

Tom Peters liked to say “what gets measured gets done.”  The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) took this advice to heart when they started the federal Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/part/) to assess and improve federal program performance so that the Federal government can achieve better results. PART includes a set of criteria in the form of questions that helps an evaluator to identify a program’s strengths and weaknesses to inform funding and management decisions aimed at making the program more effective.

I think we can take a lesson from Tom and the OMB and begin using a formal framework for evaluating the level of implementation and real-world results of the many Law Enforcement Information Sharing projects around the nation.  Not for any punitive purposes, but as a proactive way to ensure that the energy, resources, and political will continues long enough to see these projects achieve what their architects originally envisioned. 

I would like to propose that the evaluation framework be based on six “Standards for Law Enforcement Information Sharing” that every LEIS project should strive to comply with; they include:

1. Active Executive Engagement in LEIS Governance and Decision-Making;

2. Robust Privacy and Security Policy and Active Compliance Oversight;

3. Public Safety Priorities Drive Utilization Through Full Integration into Daily Operations;

4. Access and Fusion of the Full Breadth and Depth of Regional Data (law enforcement related);

5. Wide Range of Technical Capabilities to Support Public Safety Business Processes; and

6. Stable Base of Sustainment Funding for Operational and Technical Infrastructure Support.

My next step is to develop scoring criteria for each of these standards; three to five per standard, something simple and easy for project managers and stakeholders to use as a tool to help get LEIS “done.”

I would like to what you think of these standards and if you would like to help me develop the evaluation tool itself…r/Chuck

Chuck Georgo
chuck@nowheretohide.org
www.nowheretohide.org