What is NIEM? NIEM for me foremost is community. It is the program that enables community
to get together to decide to solve an important problem and to put in place the processes the
the language by which we make movement on some of our most important social issues of today.
Whether it's screening terrorism for the safety of the United States or finding children in Amber Alerts
or even the increasing response time in our fire departments, so communities to get together and
they decide they want to solve a problem they as a community decide how they're going to solve the
problem and then they put that into place. It is a really powerful community driven program.
The best way to think about NIEM is through its two core components. First it is a Rosetta stone -
the ability to bring together different communities to agree on common terms, policies, and data
definitions. Second it is a process and framework for developing common business or functional
standards based on common mission equities across those same communities and partners.
When I first started with NIEM, the adoption of NIEM was pretty low although the value
of NIEM across the government was high and so instinctually we had a real strong drive towards
increasing adoption. As you see that increased adoption take on as communities really take
on this as a way to do business you start seeing the network effect of just one more agency using
it or just one more County organization using it, so when I started there were two departments
the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security who were committed to using
NIEM. Today we have 16 federal agencies committed to using NIEM and since most of our information
exchange comes from the very local environment and it goes up and it goes around these are the
adoption of NIEM is having this strong network effect this strong increase of community has
allowed us to increase our capability to make decisions in a faster time frame
It saves lives. It saves lives getting that faster information in the hands
of operators that need it to put resources where they need it.