California county upgrades law enforcement data sharing
Connecting state and local government leaders
The County of San Joaquin’s Information Systems Division has improved the county’s ability to manage arrests, issue warrants and maintain crime histories with a custom-built, Web-based system that links 1,600 users and 18 agencies countywide.
The County of San Joaquin’s Information Systems Division (ISD) has improved the county’s ability to manage arrests, issue warrants and maintain crime histories with a custom-built, Web-based system that links 1,600 users and 18 agencies countywide.
As a result, San Joaquin, a California county with a population of more than 600,000, has saved more than $1 million by eliminating the need to deploy and maintain the application on individual desktops, according to Shakir Awan, lead architect on the project. The ISD has also avoided the need to hire five to 10 additional full-time employees for information technology support.
The department wanted to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), phasing outdated case-management applications off the mainframe. SOA frameworks give application developers the ability to design enterprise applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused to create an adaptable IT infrastructure.
ISD deployed Oracle infrastructure software ,including the company's Application Development Framework, SOA Suite, Application Server, Database, JDeveloper and Internet Directory.
A big challenge was how to move applications from the mainframe without disrupting service to the users and not affecting other applications that remained on the mainframe system, Awan said.
The Oracle software configuration library and run-time adapters can integrate mainframe applications into the Oracle SOA suite, he said.
ISD decided on an Oracle infrastructure because many of the IT employees already had significant expertise with Oracle technology, and Oracle’s scalability and features were more comprehensive than comparable solutions such as Microsoft BizTalk, Awan said.
The Oracle solution lets the county’s courts, district attorney, public defender and law enforcement agencies share critical documents in real time, he said.
The ISD has been able to integrate various heterogeneous systems across county agencies with the court’s mainframe – improving information sharing and decision-making. This has also helped the ISD lay the foundation for a flexible architecture to support the transition to the state court system.
In the future, the ISD plans to integrate a probation case management system with Oracle SOA Suite, so the county’s courts, the district attorney, the public defender and law enforcement agencies can efficiently exchange probation information, Awan said.