Enterprise Information Integration (EII) – a Case Study

By Ed Carroll, Online Business Systems

The vast majority of our digital communication and information exchanges happen within unstructured formats, such as documents, text statements, email and web pages. Integrating databases has been possible for a long time, but integrating information that resides in unstructured formats continues to be difficult. However, the business and social benefits of integrating information, as opposed to just data, can be significant.

Utilizing XML-based messaging models, it is now possible to find structures within unstructured information, as well as traditional database and online transaction-processing resources. The ability to deal with unstructured information sources also enables long-sought concepts of re-usability and ease-of-integration implementation.

This article provides a case study of the integration of information for the Seattle Police Department. The Seattle Police, like departments in many major metropolitan locations, must deal with jurisdictional problems, ownership of data problems and legacy data issues on a scale that makes the problem as complex, or more so, than that of a multi-national business.

With 20 years of experience in the development of complex integrated solutions for clients, Online Business Systems has demonstrated successes delivering what is now called enterprise information integration (EII). One example is our implementation for the Seattle Police Department. In this implementation, Online successfully integrated as many as 15 different information sources through an enterprise service bus within a services-oriented architecture, enabling two-way access for first responders to real-time information maintained by a dozen different municipalities.

Although this case study is about a public safety application, it is entirely applicable toward similar situations within a large multi-national corporation with stove-pipe operations. Each operation maintains its own budget and wants to do things its own way. As business changes, no operation wants to be tied to a solution forced on it by an outsider; rather each wants to maintain the ability to react to its own business needs as quickly as the changes in the marketplace happen. Enterprise information integration separates the problem of integration from the function set of the applications, data and information. Once implemented, it becomes easy and routine to plug new systems into the “bus” and reuse existing or previous interfaces.

Introduction to enterprise information integration (EII)
EII is an old/new concept that combines the capabilities of enterprise application integration with those defined within a services-oriented architecture to manage both structured and unstructured data (information). The phrase started appearing in trade literature somewhere between 2002 and 2004. However, the idea had no teeth until XML became well established and understood as a translation tool for unstructured data, usually transported across the Internet. Simultaneously, the concepts of services-oriented architecture (SOA) evolved to provide a macro level plan for how to combine the point-to-point concepts of older integration tools with newer web services, offering knowledge workers access to information – services that encapsulate business rules with data – from virtually any digital source, and in near real-time, if needed.

The enterprise service bus
An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a distributed, massively scalable implementation of loosely coupled services and processes built on top of a mediation layer that provides core and basic management, security and messaging functionality. These services interact with existing applications and services across the enterprise to form a single, logical entity.

Information can then be exchanged and services used, reused and controlled by the bus in a secured manner. The ESB is the essential enabler of services communicating between external systems and applications. Services can then be used to exchange information or to add new functionality to other applications across the enterprise.

Federation allows each local agency to own its security policies
Not all stakeholder and/or participating agencies and departments in the Seattle region can be unified under a single security policy. Every organization has unique requirements and policies that cannot be met under a unified structure. Federation describes a scenario in which no one group or organization manages all users and resources in a distributed application environment. Instead, administrators in distinct domains manage local security policies that support mutually beneficial transactions among their respective spheres of operation. In this model it is possible for a division in downtown Seattle (or Japan, to go back to the multi-national reference) to operate very differently than a division in Redmond (or any town USA).

Standards-based messaging
The Seattle Police Department implementation required utilizing the NIEM, GJXDM, and IEEE-1512 standards as the underlying data architecture standards. These standards are common across much of the criminal justice and public safety sector. In general, a canonical format is established based on NIEM / GJXDM on the ESB and put data transformations between all partners and the canonical format.

The data abstraction approach, illustrated here, demonstrates how end-point partners can provide data in the format they are familiar with while still retaining a common NIEM / GJXDM-based representation on the ESB that can be leveraged for distribution to new/existing partners. Furthermore, this approach provides the capability to support several versions of the same standard in a production environment. This can be an important feature as the system grows and new partners are added. Existing data exchanges can remain unchanged as newer standards are adopted, reducing the risk of errors introduced when migrating to newer versions.

• The NIEM XML-based metadata registry is, in effect, a protected area where only approved individuals can make changes.
  
• The semantics and representations provided by NIEM has helped break down the data silos that have existed between municipalities as a result of proprietary file formats, data meaning and usage.

The above standards are unique to justice and public safety. However, similar standards exist for many industries and general business communication protocols. Therefore, similar advantages exist for solutions in many industry sectors.

The Seattle Police Department ESB
The Seattle Police Department (SPD) acquired a law enforcement technology solution from Versaterm comprised of 4 integrated applications – domputer-aided dispatch (CAD), mobile CAD, records management system (RMS) and mobile RMS or automated field reporting (AFR). The SPD recognized the need to replace the existing interfaces of its current legacy system and had the foresight to seek an independent information exchange / message brokering system with the capability to be interoperable, scalable, extensible and highly reliable. SPD wanted the exchange to be independent from its CAD/RMS system.

The current catalogue of NIEM-compliant message structures that have been developed for SPD includes:

SPD researched and tried other integration solutions (such as point-to-point or database gateways), but those efforts did not provide the robust solution that spanned multiple municipalities. None of the other solutions integrated information, only data. And the problem of integrating across municipalities was always difficult because of conflicts with information ownership. This EII solution allowed each agency to provide information to the other agencies in the manner that worked for them.

The ESB and messaging backbone implemented for SPD is commercially available and tied together with the knowledge and skills of Online Business Systems’ 20 years of experience in developing complex integrated solutions in ways that enable the business to remain agile and competitive in the marketplace.

Conclusion – EII enables the business to quickly respond to market changes
The media and the public are often surprised about suffering and crime that happens because two or more agencies are not sharing information, without realizing how difficult the problem is. In Seattle, those situations are much fewer because they really do share information across jurisdiction boundaries. The enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture provides a highly available, fault-tolerant, standards-based messaging platform that enables SPD to not only exchange data, but to create re-useable message exchanges with centrally hosted business rules that can be re-used by current and future SPD systems. The services developed and governed by the ESB solve the problems of interoperability and facilitate information sharing between state and county jurisdictional boundaries. Using enterprise service bus (ESB) and web service technology, the project established a scalable, secure and reliable technology foundation for service-oriented and message-based information sharing and data integration across Seattle Police Department and its partner agencies.

This type of solution is not right for every integration problem, but when the problem is this complex, an enterprise information integration solution such as this is a very elegant way to solve the problem. Even though both the business and technology are evolving, and integration business problems are different for every situation, once implemented, future changes are easy to manage for the long-term.

When EII solutions make the most sense is when the business needs to be able to react quickly to constantly changing business situations, and in order to respond, information is needed collaboratively from many sources owned by different organizations – when each is used to solving its own problems.

About the author
Ed Carroll directs sales and marketing for Online Business Systems, an IT consulting company that specializes in knowledge integration; as in solving complex information integration problems within very dynamic business environments. Ed’s career has spanned sales, marketing and development of software products and services for more than 25 years, with particular expertise in automating economic optimization, business intelligence and supply-chain management processes. He has provided strategic technology leadership in roles such as the vice president of engineering for Egghead.com, director of technology at Nike and director of software engineering at Boeing. He can be reached at ecarroll@obsglobal.com