Portal-mania: They’re reproducing like bunnies, but they ain’t as cute
I had a conversation with a fusion center director yesterday about portals that really drove home a feeling I had about the recent plethora (read: boatload) of portals that the average analyst person supporting public safety and homeland security has to login to in order to do their jobs.
I’m paraphrasing a bit, but he basically indicated that the state, local, and private sector organizations in his state told him that they “DO NOT want to have to log into multiple portals” to stay informed about criminal and terrorism threats to their state’s infrastructure.”
When you take a closer look at the “Portal-mania” that exists, it seems that every agency and multiple programs within a single agency has to have their own portal for accessing the information and analytic tools that agency or program provides; here’s a quick list of ones I am familar with, (feel free to email me the names of others you know about):
- DHS HSIN State and Local Community of Interest (SLIC)
- DHS Lessons Learned Information Sharing (LLIS)
- DHS Automated Critical Asset Management System (ACAMS)
- DOJ Regional Data Exchange (R-DEx)
- DOJ National Data Exchange (N-DEx)
- DOJ eGuardian
- DOJ Law Enforcement Online (LEO)
- DOJ InfraGard
- DOJ National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW)
- DOJ National Criminal Intelligence Resource Center (NCIRC)
- DOJ Regional information Sharing System (RISS)
- Private Sector CyberCop
- [State] Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS)
- …add to this Department of the Treasury, Department of Transportation, and other federal agency portals
- …and about three-dozen other databases and private sector websites
This is nutz! Dedicated portals are so 1990’s…we should be able to use the same technology I used to create this website and blog (WordPress and four different plug-in widgets) to make information and advanced analytic capabilities available to Fusion Centers and other public safety users. I would like to challenge the agencies and programs listed above to make the information and capabilities they offer available through widgets, web-parts, and gadgets that Fusion Centers and other intelligence/information sharing users can integrate into THEIR portal of choice.
Whether it’s SharePoint, Oracle, or IBM Websphere, state, local, or private sector organizations should be able to pick and integrate into THEIR selected portal environment from the portal list above the information and capabilities that they need to do their job–they should not have to access the multiple, stovepiped portals as they do today.
I’d like to know what you think about this…Thanks..r/Chuck Georgo