But how so? Read on…

Part 1 – The challenge

NIEM is an important cog in a government case management solution. At some point in a case’s lifecycle, you may need to share the case-related information with other agencies or individuals, perhaps to get assistance in completing the case or maybe to give more information to another agency for a similar case that they’re working on. Whatever the reason, this information must be easily passed from one system to the next without being ‘lost in translation’.

NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) is a framework for sharing enterprise-wide information across all levels of government. It has a core set of elements that are standard across all the agencies and has more specific ones for the various entities and stakeholders. Agencies can now speak a common language, allowing one agency to publish data from its case management system to the XML standard, which can then be picked up and parsed by another agency that requires this information.

Now all you need is a case management system that lets you export data into the NIEM standard and then a parser to put it back in.

Pretty neat and simple, n’est-ce pas?

Almost. (Let’s face it, if it really were that simple, I’d have nothing to write about and I’d just put up some comics to keep you entertained.)

There are a few problems to watch out for:

• Before importing or exporting, the system must check the data’s security classification. A document requiring a classification level of Top Secret cannot be sent to an agency (or individual) with only Confidential level access. Perhaps only certain parts of the document are deemed to be Top  Secret, in which case, the publishing tool should be able to extract only those parts that are at the required access level.

• Large amounts of data may need to be continuously exported to, or imported from, an external system. Every time an update is made to case data, it may be necessary to push this information out to other agencies. So it may be better to export/import only the changed data and update the existing data. This reduces the time and cost of transfer and would help to reduce duplicated data.

• Data may be imported that already exists in the case management system. Checks need to be in place to handle matching data during import. When duplicate data is found, is it better to replace the data or create a new version of the existing data?

Armedia Case Management comes with a tool specifically to import from and export to NIEM that tackles these problems. Stay tuned for Part Two… The Solution, which discusses how ACM implements the NIEM publishing process.

Until then, here’s a comic strip to keep you entertained (don’t we all just love Dilbert)…

As my colleague has clearly stated in his blog, My name is NIEM, NIEM is not a silver bullet.  There are many issues to resolve:

1. Security of information once export from system.
2. Sharing of information between civilian and intelligence agencies – What if it contains data about US citizen?  How do we share with our international partners?
3. What if one system does not support all data elements and during the import data is lost?  Agency could be making decisions based on limited information.
4. When does the imported data become stale?  What if the case is active and new information contradicts the export data that has been shared?
5. Given the limited budgets of local and state law enforcements, how do they participate in collaborating to combat crime?
6. How do we combat data overload once data is being shared throughout the community?

These issues/concerns must and will be addressed because the alternative is not acceptable.  Our enemy wins when we allow distractions to take our eyes off accomplishing this goal of information sharing amongst the community.  As I review current and future procurements, I am glad to see the FBI, DHS and others make this a core element of their system.

NIEM which stands for the, inevitably, not so sexy sounding National Information Exchange Model is a formal information exchange schema developed by the US government (specifically DOJ and DHS) to further information sharing across Federal, and in time, State and Local government agencies and their business constituents. NIEM builds on from the much more bulky Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) model; an off-shoot of post 9/11 information sharing initiatives. The idea of NIEM (currently in version 2.1) is to provide a consistent, non-redundant, open standards based XML schema that has some well defined entities and activities for improved inter-agency communication and information sharing.

All good…but what’s new, eh? Well, I think what is new is the fact that NIEM seems to be much more than just another academic exercise. Since its infancy in 2005, there have been multiple live and pilot projects (particularly around criminal investigation related content) at many Federal and State agencies, a set of open source tools have been developed and continue to grow, and the government (including Fed CIO, Vivek Kundra) seem more than ever to be pushing the standard and making it a part of the overall US government strategy for information sharing–see data.gov.

So, how does this apply to content management? Well, as with 21CFR11, 5015 2&4, SOX and most your other garden variety compliance oriented standards, there is an opportunity. An opportunity to become compliant (read: running afoul of the government is not a good thing if you want to work with them). And, an opportunity to be productive (read: information transparency and efficient content sharing can lead to some bottom line savings and possibly…and this is where you need to put your salesforce.com hat on…new revenue development channels).

As far as ECM goes, it seems to me that minimally NIEM would have an obvious play along the lines of Case Management (particularly for investigative records) and, in a larger context, Records Management. Empirically though it’s not there yet. Case Management is still quite immature as an offering. Though there are, of course, many solutions out there, most are heavily bespoke or still based on legacy structured data and structured data management systems. In a world of exploding DOC, PPT, PDF, MP3, FLV, et al content sources the days of pure structured content solutions are numbered. As for Records Management, despite hype to the contrary, it seems we are still very much focused on eDiscovery related records management–hail Email Archival!! I think there is change afoot though, with greater investment than ever–at least by the government–in Case Management, Records Management and information sharing initiatives.

NIEM, of course, is not nor will ever be a silver bullet. Ultimately, it’s a suggested structure for content storage and exchange. However, as with the neighbor’s grass, you could always bemoan the greener pastures…only to realize in time that with a little spade work your own grass aint half bad. NIEM can be that spade…