Peter Cooper of El Paso County, Texas, enjoys working with technology. He likes the public sector, and he especially likes working with other IT professionals to shape technology's future in Texas government. He's been the county's CTO for five years, and started building a collaborative relationship with the city of El Paso soon after he began. The county's 35-member Information Technology Department helps train city staff on new software products, and Cooper laid the groundwork for shared applications between the two layers of government.

As a result, El Paso County shares a court system with the city of El Paso, and the records management system is shared between the county Sheriff's Office and the city Police Department.

For the past two years, Cooper has served as chairman for the IT Directors Group of the Texas Conference of Urban Counties (CUC), a nonprofit organization composed of 37 counties that are home to nearly 80 percent of Texas' population.

The CUC's goal is to share ideas, resources and programs for the betterment of member counties. Although it's a simple goal, governments haven't historically been receptive to working with other governments. But that's changing, and people like Cooper are the reason that protectionist mindset is disappearing.

In 2002, the CUC's executive director kick-started a program called TechShare -- a forum counties use to collaborate on technology projects and share information resources. Through TechShare, counties work mutually on IT projects, saving money by sharing research and development costs.

These projects take diverse forms -- applications, systems or IT assets -- and become the CUC's property, available to all members. To date, TechShare's two biggest projects are the Common Integrated Justice System (CIJS) and the Juvenile Information System (JIS).

TechShare is coordinating the CIJS's development across multiple counties to achieve economies of scale and interoperability, Cooper said, and all participating counties can use the system when it's complete.

State government also is paying attention to TechShare, Cooper said -- Texas CTO Larry Olson attends forum meetings to work with counties to develop interfaces between county and state IT systems.

The CIJS system could save Texas counties $100 million in hardware and licensing costs, Cooper said, primarily because no large Texas counties currently run a modern justice information system. It's not just about the technology either, he said, because smaller counties in Texas would not have had the chance to meet with larger counties and share knowledge.

Developed with grant money by Dallas County, the Internet-based JIS software now is being deployed in El Paso. The system allows sharing of criminal history and offense information to help policymakers and county personnel make good decisions on the early identification, control, supervision and treatment of juvenile offenders. All area law enforcement agencies, juvenile probation, prosecutors and school districts will use the JIS.