Throughout the consolidation process, the unique demands of separate agencies have bogged down many IT agencies. And due to the confidentiality concerns of information used by criminal justice agencies, such as state police, highway patrol and investigative bureaus, transitioning such agencies to a consolidated IT model is typically a difficult proposition. Knowing that this was a possible challenge, however, both IOT and the Indiana State Police (ISP) conducted numerous planning meetings to set the course of consolidation, which was successfully completed in 2006.
Now, a decade later, state Chief Information Officer Dewand Neely and ISP Assistant Chief of Staff for Communication and Information Systems at ISP Major Michael White reflect upon the challenges and successes of IT consolidation. Both were mid-level managers and in the trenches during the start of the IT consolidation, and now each have the consolidation experience under their belts as they lead their respective agencies.
The Indiana Office of Technology Perspective — by CIO Dewand Neely
When the statewide IT consolidation began, I was a Senior Systems Administrator. And before the project to consolidate the Indiana State Police was proposed, we had consolidated several large agencies, but had not yet worked with an agency responsible for public safety.Transitioning the management of back-office systems such as email, file/print and data backup made sense both financially and as a support model. Allowing the troopers to focus on their core role of public safety — and not have to worry about replacing hard drives on a server, or sitting on the phone with a vendor haggling over a support agreement — felt like the proper thing to do.
The challenge, however, was with addressing the demands of the troopers in the field and making sure response time to their needs was adequate. In a normal business operation, 24/7 support is implied but not necessarily demanded. Servers and applications are monitored 24/7, and they are repaired as needed if issues occur after hours. End-user support, however, is typically handled on a next-business-day basis, and your typical end-user is not performing work duties at, say, 3 a.m.
So to allow for a solution that would satisfy both parties, IOT and ISP had to get creative around this aspect. IOT had already implemented a distributed-support model for the field, which closely mimicked ISP’s distributed-police-post model. This helped address the majority of field-support needs.
The other demand pertained to the heavily relied upon hardware in the trooper’s vehicle. The laptop, for instance, could not be down for an entire day, thereby preventing the trooper from effectively performing his or her job. The two agencies creatively stocked the distributed police posts with spare hardware so that emergencies could be addressed in very short order.
The agencies also created an on-call rotation for field staff specifically for public safety issues and emergencies, which further decreased the amount of time a trooper had to wait to be serviced during off hours. This same process has since been instituted for the computer-aided dispatch systems in all ISP posts. Policies, procedures and standards created around hardware models, system imaging and warranties have helped lower the number of system failures per year. Beyond that, these practices have also helped decrease the time required to resolve issues experienced by troopers and other ISP staff.
The Indiana State Police Perspective — by Major Michael White
I was a first sergeant for the ISP when the IT consolidation idea was suggested to our agency. At that time, my primary responsibility was managing the IT hardware assets of the agency, including all of the servers in our data center. Losing control of equipment was a concern, as was the possibility that employees might be transferred. Enforcement personnel were protected, but civilian IT personnel who had been with the agency for decades faced the possibility of transferring to the newly created Indiana IOT. The uncertainty of the future caused tension at first. Nationally, we could find no other state police organizations that had successfully taken on such a project at the scale Indiana was attempting.ISP was one of the last of the approximately 100 agencies to transition to consolidation. It was a benefit for IOT to delay larger and more complex agencies, while building upon the successes of the others. However, they quickly found out we were different. Besides having badges and being armed, we had many systems with complicated security requirements.
To begin the transition planning, ISP’s IT team completed a survey provided by IOT to obtain an equipment and program inventory. At first, there were topics with which IOT was not familiar — including the state police’s responsibilities related to the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) programs. Each agency had its own security concerns going into consolidation, and ours involved the management of the state’s interface into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the State Message Switch, the Criminal History Repository, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and interfacing into NLETS. It was imperative for both IOT and ISP to rely upon each other to successfully navigate the consolidation obstacles surrounding the CJIS security policies, as well as other state and federal requirements governing criminal justice data.
The key to achieving the original consolidation goals – and the reason we now can mark our 10th year of success — is open communications between IOT and ISP. Fiscally, it did not make sense to run many of the functions separately; the cost savings were substantial. It is important to note that agencies cannot go through an IT consolidation with an adversarial mindset.
With a well thought out plan and the right people in place representing each agency, consolidation can be successful. Looking back over the last 10 years at the improvements ISP has made and the successes it has experienced in information technology, it is quite evident that none of it would have been possible without the IT consolidation happening first.
