Eia: Bringing Law And Order To King County

Washington State’s King County, which includes Seattle and surrounding cities, used enterprise application integration (EAI) technology to link its old mainframe system to a multi-agency Jail Inmate Look-up Service. The new service helps centralize inmate information for different county law enforcement agencies so that there is less chance for an inmate becoming lost, and less bureaucracy. The implementation has been extended to eight of King County’s 15 law enforcement groups, including the sheriff’s office, the public defender’s office, the jail, and the prosecutor’s office. The King County Office of Information Resource Management re-hired its original integration partner, Interlink, to help connect six client systems to the mainframe, and then use Microsoft’s BizTalk Server for linking applications. The integration approach allowed King County to keep its old infrastructure, but required teamwork both on the technical and bureaucratic levels. Agency IT administrators now need to consider the impact of infrastructure upgrades on the look-up service, for example. Though the system increases security, the main driver of the project was cost-savings, according to Interlink strategic services director Alain Dias, who worked on the project for King County.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from CRN (11/01/04) No. 1119, P. 41; Darrow, Barbara .