The Global Information Sharing Toolkit contains 131 documents containing guidance on how to implement effective integrated justice and information sharing. The resources in the GIST represent agreed-upon guidelines and practices drawn from successful implementations around the country. It includes the components of the Global Reference Architecture (GRA), Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM) guidance, Global Technical Privacy Framework, and more. A main goal of the GIST is to encourage cross-boundary interoperability by making common policy and technical approaches available for multiple jurisdictions to follow.
The Open Justice Broker (OJB) takes this interoperability goal one step further, by making implementations of many of these guidelines available for multiple jurisdictions to follow. So, instead of developers from several states or local jurisdictions reading the same documents and building things the same way, they can access and reuse major, core pieces that are already built in conformance to the standards.
What remains is to “wire up” the common, core components to the systems in use in each jurisdiction. While that is generally not a trivial effort, at least a good part of the hard work has now been done by, and can be reused from, the OJB—thus saving implementers a great deal of time, effort, and expense. And what’s more, there is a higher likelihood that systems built by different vendors or in different jurisdictions can exchange information, because they can do so using a set of core components as the foundation.
If you are an architect, CIO, or program manager in a justice agency or jurisdiction, and you’re committed to implementing open standards but don’t want to start from scratch, the OJB likely has many components that will accelerate your path to success! If you’d like to know more: ask on the mailing list and we will help you.