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Image: Rick Steele

National Park Service CIO Dom Nessi said the agency is using Extensible Business Reporting Language to track contractors such as those operating around the Statue of Liberty.

In this report

The eight bosses of data sharing

Why is sharing data across agencies so difficult? You have eight different parties to contend with, notes Steve Sawyer, associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Sawyer and graduate student Michael Tyworth studied how California’s Automated Regional Justice Information System was developed. Sawyer presented the duo’s findings at the International Conference for Digital Government, held recently in San Diego.

ARJIS provides a good example of how information can be shared across disparate institutional bodies. The program spans 50 criminal justice jurisdictions. It processes about 35,000 transactions a day. Whenever a police officer from the San Diego Sheriff’s Office runs the name of an individual through the ARJIS system, results come back not only from that jurisdiction’s system but also from the California Highway Patrol, the U.S. Border Patrol and other bodies.

Studying ARJIS, the researchers found that to share data across different agency systems required system designers to think about eight distinct “large interest groups” that have a stake in each system, Sawyer said. An interest group can either be an organizational body or an abstract entity that is maintained by a set of stakeholders, but all eight must be addressed when facilitating intersystem sharing:

A local politician may want two systems to interact, but the differences between the applications, data models and infrastructures will have to be addressed. Will the end devices be able to view the data? And unless the actual users of the system agree to use the new capabilities, data sharing will not occur.

ARJIS itself serves as an unusual example of data sharing in that the originators did not follow the traditional approaches of system design, Sawyer said.

Instead they used an organic approach, one that incorporates both high-level thinking and top-down design along with acceptance of grass-roots, bottoms-up initiatives.

Local jurisdictions are free to add components to the system, which other jurisdictions may or may not wish to participate in. An ARJIS oversight body keeps tabs on the various extensions of the system to ensure duplication of effort is minimized.

Such an approach can look disjointed, but in fact, the system—and supporting organization—is able to incorporate new entities and features quite easily, Sawyer said. The strategic goals drive the design, and the system continues to evolve. “It is not a very neat system, but it is a very adaptive system,” Sawyer said.

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Fuzzy matching