NIEM Newsletter
Call for Nominations—NBAC and NC&OC Chairs
The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Executive Steering Council (ESC) is currently seeking candidates to cochair their committees—the NIEM Business Architecture Committee (NBAC) and the NIEM Communications and Outreach Committee (NC&OC).
The two committees help govern NIEM by ensuring that the program is driven by the day-to-day needs of participating organizations to share information across organizational, system, and geographic boundaries.
- NBAC defines and governs the foundation and processes for establishing and supporting the participation of individual domains in NIEM.
- NC&OC defines and governs the outreach, communication, and public interactions with the broad stakeholder community.
All committees are led by two cochairs—one representing the federal government and the other representing a state, local, and/or tribal government agency.
Interested parties may either nominate another person or apply themselves. Nominations are now open and will close at the close of business on December 11, 2009.
Committee Roles and Responsibilities—The cochairs’ duties include the following:
- Determine committee appointments and reappointments, seeking to maintain representation across all levels of government and NIEM domains.
- Determine the committee’s agenda and strategic direction, consistent with the overall goals of the NIEM program.
- Monitor discussion at meetings to meet agenda goals.
- Delegate committee work to appropriate subcommittees and tiger teams and monitor their progress.
- Annually review the mission and goals of the committee and evaluate the committee's effectiveness in meeting its stated purpose and function.
- Represent their committee and the NIEM program at national conferences as needed.
Commitment—All committee members are expected to provide up to 10 hours per month of volunteer time, as needed, for projects and working groups. This time commitment includes attendance on monthly conference calls and at two semiannual face-to-face meetings. In addition, committee chairs may be required to attend NIEM leadership meetings or conference calls, as needed, such as the annual executive off-site meeting.
Qualifications—Chairing a NIEM committee requires a solid background in managing information sharing projects and a solid understanding of the business drivers for information exchange. But the most effective leaders will also possess the breadth of experience to articulate a vision for improving information sharing on a nationwide scale, as well as the energy and commitment to secure buy-in to that vision by the program’s diverse stakeholders.
To apply—Submit a résumé and a brief cover letter, summarizing the candidate’s qualifications, to NIEMPMO@niem.gov. Nominations will be screened by the ESC, with formal decisions to be made by January 2010. The screening process may involve requests for additional information or telephone or in-person interviews. Questions may be directed to NIEMPMO@niem.gov.
Case Study:
NIEM Provides a Platform for Helping Children at Risk
In a unique collaboration between the National Center for State Courts and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, significant improvements are being made to improve outcomes for abused and neglected children. Through the use of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), the Family Services domain continues to evolve.
Performance measures are necessary to measure the progress of states in achieving positive outcomes for children in care; timely sharing of data between child welfare agencies and courts is needed to construct such measures and to identify potential improvement in operations. NIEM provides a comprehensive framework for structuring the data exchanges so that each state can begin with a reusable template that can be easily tailored to its individual needs.
Data exchange templates have been developed for four distinct types of exchanges—juvenile petition, adjudication order, service plan, and court report. A field test in Vermont has revealed that the template can accommodate an overwhelming percentage of use cases without modification. Regional meetings have been held to inform states of the benefits of data exchange and to guide the next steps toward implementation.
Read the complete case study at www.niem.gov.
Feature Story:
Effective and Interoperable Implementation of NIEM
By: Iveta Topalova
Achieving effective and efficient governmental operations in typical and emergency situations relies heavily on sharing information between organizations across jurisdiction and domain boundaries. As a result, there are hundreds of thousands of government organizations that have a critical need to share information. Traditionally, these agencies have operated under significant autonomy, which has given them considerable control over their internal business process and technology choices. While this autonomy has allowed each agency to optimize process and technology to more effectively meet the unique challenges of its stakeholders and environment, the same autonomy has created a very diverse and heterogeneous information sharing environment. As a result, the only way to achieve efficient information sharing in this environment is through interoperability.
One of the main challenges to information sharing in a diverse, heterogeneous environment is the silos of information and functionality typical to this environment. Further, the information systems responsible for the information and functionality are implemented using different technologies, networks, hardware, and software. This usually results in information sharing realized as point-to-point integration between disparate systems, which is extremely costly to implement, manage, and maintain.
This article presents an approach to architecting and implementing information sharing solutions that leverages the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) as its main building block to promote interoperability. Additional benefits of this implementation approach are agility, scalability, and cost efficiency through the leveraging of existing investments and the reuse of information sharing assets. One of the first challenges of information sharing across domain and jurisdiction boundaries is the diversity of information government organizations collect and process. The traditional autonomy these organizations have also leads to different business processes and variety of interpretations of the information. NIEM resolves this challenge by creating a canonical data model, a data dictionary, and markup language constructs that allow standardization of the meaning and structure of information for a single domain as well as across domains. That is the first step to resolving the interoperability challenge. Consistently using NIEM for the purposes of information sharing allows government organizations to use a well-described and understood common vocabulary and data structure.
The next step in defining an interoperable approach to information sharing requires a consistent way of constructing and documenting the messages exchanged between government organizations. A NIEM Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD) fulfills this requirement by establishing a well-defined IEPD structure and development lifecycle.
The IEPD Package Template provides a predefined folder structure and naming convention for the IEPD artifacts. The IEPD Package Template also contains files that can be used as templates for creating certain artifacts such as the IEPD catalog, IEPD metadata, IEPD main document, etc. The IEPD lifecycle, Figure 1, begins with scenario planning and the analysis of high-level business requirements, and goes through many stages before the final IEPD is assembled and published. The final task of the IEPD lifecycle is implementation, and the approach to this task is critical for the success of the information exchange for which the IEPD was developed.
While addressing the data and message layer concerns is an important step in solving the interoperability puzzle, there are other significant challenges that should be considered. These challenges are best addressed by a complete information sharing architecture. While there are many information sharing architecture styles, industry and government best practices have established Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a strategy for overcoming interoperability challenges while providing the benefits of business agility and future scalability, among many others. This approach was endorsed by the Global Advisory Committee in its 2004 recommendation as the most effective architectural style for the national justice community. The architecture principles of SOA are especially applicable to cross-domain and cross-jurisdiction information sharing.
The benefits of SOA are best described in a recent statement of some of the most renowned contributors to SOA development at http://www.soa-manifesto.org:
"Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation. We have been applying service orientation to help organizations consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs.
Through our work, we have come to prioritize:
Business value over technical strategy
Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
Flexibility over optimization
Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection
That is, while we value the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. "
SOA, as defined by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is a paradigm for organizing and using distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. In the real world, organizations and people develop capabilities to solve problems or support solutions for their needs. Often, these capabilities solve the needs of other organizations and, as such, may be offered as services to those organizations with such needs. This can be logically extended into the distributed computing world as one computing agent providing the capabilities to support the needs of another computing agent.
SOA provides the framework to match needs and capabilities. The ability to bring the capability to bear is a service, which is a central concept in SOA. The entities that offer capabilities are service providers and the entities with needs that make use of the services are service consumers. Services are published in service directories that allow discoverability and visibility of the available services to potential service consumers.
Many approaches and technologies can be leveraged to deploy architectures based on SOA principles, but the most common implementations use Web Services. The wide use of Web Services is mainly because Web Services use eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for communication, leverage open nonproprietary standards, and are both self-containing and self-describing. The above characteristics make Web Services very suitable for implementing interoperable, agile, and scalable information sharing architectures. Applying SOA to resolve information sharing challenges is effectively leveraged by the Global Justice Reference Architecture (JRA), a technical implementation architecture that addresses the full range of information sharing use cases and provides a comprehensive blueprint for implementing interoperable data sharing services and capabilities. This dynamic interoperability strategy will help to prevent incompatibilities and guide vendors and organizations on how to fit information sharing components together and facilitate communication and interoperability between disparate communities.
The Global JRA is composed of a set of specifications, guidelines, and infrastructure requirements for implementing SOA in the justice and public safety environment. The JRA also provides guidance on how to leverage NIEM, the Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM) framework, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), the Justice Information Exchange Model (JIEM), and other industry and open standards and best practices in an SOA context, and aims to take a lot of the hard work out of implementing SOA. It is very important to note that while developed for justice and public safety agencies, the JRA can be leveraged by agencies representing other domains.
An important key for realizing the benefits of service orientation is identifying and prioritizing the services to be implemented. Considering business derivers and objectives and performing business decomposition and interaction analysis early in this process is critical. Taking into account the technical constraints of the current implementation and deployment environment is an essential factor. A methodology for meeting these objectives is described in the JRA Guidance for Designing and Identifying Services (JRA-GIDS).
The JRA Web Services Service Interaction Profile (WS-SIP) demonstrates how to implement the information sharing requirements common for the criminal justice and public safety community, such as authentication and authorization, message integrity and confidentiality, reliability, etc., leveraging the Web Services standards. The rationale behind the WS-SIP is that just saying “Web Services” is not enough to ensure interoperability or even guarantee use of particular standards. There are many, sometimes conflicting, notions of what “Web Services” means. The WS-SIP addresses that problem by giving practitioners a specific “path” through the Web Services standards that ensures interoperability between consumers and providers who adopt Web Services for SOA implementation.
Another key JRA artifact is the Service Specification. A Service Specification is a formal documentation of the capabilities made available through a specific service, including:
- The JRA-SSP is a collection of documents, templates, and artifacts describing the above-mentioned aspects of a service, as a result enabling two of the main principles of service orientation—discoverability and visibility.
- The JRA-SSG presents in detail the elements of the JRA-SSP and guides consumers and providers in creating and utilizing the package. The JRA-SSG also defines the conformance requirements to be followed when developing JRA-SSPs.
JRA SSPs are similar to NIEM IEPDs in that they document the conceptual, logical, and physical models of a service in the same way NIEM IEPDs document the conceptual, logical, and physical models of the information comprising an exchange. Also, as with IEPDs, service specifications are a composite set of documentation, models, policies, contracts, and schemas that together provide a clear view of the service’s capabilities and its business and technical requirements. Furthermore, IEPDs and SSPs complement each other and work in tandem to describe a service. IEPDs are critical components of the JRA-SSP, since they are used as an integral part of the package to describe the information model of the service.
One of the key advantages of applying the Global JRA is that it provides guidance for architecting information sharing solutions by leveraging and incorporating into a common framework a collection of industry and open standards. Provided below is an approach and a vision of how an organization can use a predefined set of standards, guidelines, and artifacts to achieve interoperable, agile, and scalable information sharing. All of the artifacts presented in the diagram are available at http://www.niem.gov and http://it.ojp.gov.
Following this approach increases the interoperability, agility, and scalability of the resulting information sharing systems. Another key benefit of this approach is that it promotes leveraging legacy systems and thus results in reduction of information sharing costs. In addition, this approach enables service reuse and allows the use of the resulting services as enterprise assets, which has the potential of additional exponential cost savings as existing services are leveraged for new exchanges or tasks through reuse.
The content for this article was taken from the NIEM Practical Implementer’s Course. For more information about this course or to refresh your knowledge, see www.niem.gov/training.php.
Other References:
- http://www.niem.gov—National Information Exchange Model
- http://it.ojp.gov/globaljra—Global Justice Reference Architecture
- http://www.soa-manifesto.org— SOA Manifesto
- Additional technical implementation information can be found in the technical brief titled "Using NIEM with Web Services," available at http://www.search.org/files/pdf/WSandNIEM-IEPD.pdf.
About the author: Iveta Topalova is a chief architect, Analysts International Corporation (AIC). She specializes in the area of justice information sharing—specifically, Service Oriented Architecture, Federated Identity Management, and Virtualization—and has authored several articles and white papers on these subjects. Ms. Topalova serves as an IJIS Institute national representative to the Global Infrastructure/Standards Working Group (GISWG) Services Implementation Committee (SIC) under the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative. She is also part of the Global Services Task Team (STT) and the Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM) Delivery Team. In this capacity, Ms. Topalova actively contributes to the development of the Justice Reference Architecture (JRA) Services Specification Package and Guideline and to the specifications for implementation of the GFIPM standard in a Web Services environment.
Write for NIEM News
Share your passion for NIEM and for promoting information sharing with more than 2,300 subscribers—write for NIEM News! As we prepare the editorial calendar for 2010, we invite you to submit your article ideas (title and short description) to the NIEM Program Management Office (NIEM PMO) at NIEMPMO@niem.gov.
NIEM Case Study Ideas Needed!
NIEM adoption and use case studies are a great way to help others understand and use NIEM. It is important, as we advocate the use of NIEM for information sharing, that we also share how NIEM is being used and highlight NIEM success stories. We need your help in collecting and developing these case studies for a variety of uses and among various levels of government and private industry.
NIEM adoption and use case studies are published in the electronic newsletter NIEM News. The newsletter is posted to the www.niem.gov site and is sent via e-mail to a targeted mailing list of interested parties. Case studies may also be used to highlight successful adoption and use of NIEM in flyers or other promotional materials to help those interested.
Do you have any real-world examples of your work highlighting NIEM in action that might work as a case study? If so, we would like to hear from you! Please send your ideas to Andrea Walter at andrea.walter@ijis.org. Case studies are simple write-ups that focus on the challenge, the solution, and the results.
NIEM Conformance for RFPs Available from IJIS Institute’s Public Safety Technical Standards Committee
NIEM Conformance for RFPs, developed by the IJIS Institute’s Public Safety Technical Standards Committee, is intended to be a resource for public safety practitioners who are making decisions with regard to procurement for public safety computer systems that have, or may in the future have, information sharing requirements with other systems. The goal is to help ensure that RFPs meet federal grant requirements and national best practices for information sharing, and to provide help in understanding the technology standards and how they relate to product selection. The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), which is most often included in U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant requirements, is a national approach and common vocabulary for information exchange. The document is located online at http://www.ijis.org/docs/NIEM_Conformance_for_RFP_20091028.pdf.
Join NIEM on LinkedIn
Join the NIEM group on LinkedIn and gain access to lively discussions and event updates. If you already have a profile on LinkedIn, simply search for NIEM and request to join the group.
Follow NIEM on Twitter
Follow NIEM updates on @NIEM_training and @NIEMExecDir
Don’t forget to include #NIEM!
NIEM Training and Events
Eastern Regional NIEM Practical Implementer’s Course
January 26–28, 2010, Ashburn, Virginia
For more information, please visit http://www.niem.gov/month.php.
Did You Miss the 2009 NIEM National Training Event?
Please visit www.NIEM.gov for access to the full agenda of audio/visual recorded keynote and track sessions, which are available for playback.
