IAC names top five Excellence.gov projects

Washington, D.C., police officers can now find information on potential suspects in about two seconds. With a keystroke, the officers can find suspects’ pictures, pictures of tattoos or other distinguishing marks, previous arrests and convictions, and upcoming appointments with their parole officers or other city law enforcement agents.

Using the Justice Information Sharing System (Justis), police officers, the federal and local court system, federal agencies, and other law enforcement agencies are integrated on one online system to more easily find and use data.

Today, Justis earned a place among the top five projects honored at the Industry Advisory Council’s Excellence.gov awards ceremony. This was the first time IAC honored a non-federal project as a top five finalist.

IAC named 20 finalists in January and recognized all of them today at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., where it also named the top five projects.

“When I’m asked, ‘How can the government drive effectiveness?’ I say, ‘We need to deliver better information to citizens or decision-makers,’ ” said Clay Johnson, the Office of Management and Budget’s deputy director for management and the keynote speaker at the event. “These 20 projects are wonderful examples of this.”

The Criminal Justice Coordinating Council started work on Justis in 1998, implemented it in 2002 and upgraded the application three times, including in January 2006, officials said.

“We needed a system that would connect at whatever capability the agencies had at the time,” said Richard Catalon, information technology liaison officer for the council. “Now it gives real-time information to everyone.”

Nancy Ware, the council’s executive director, said 22 federal and city agencies use Justis, which consolidated and integrated data from more than 70 systems.

“It really is a search engine that reaches into other agencies databases with the correct security rules,” said Brook Hedge, a judge with the Washington, D.C., Superior Court.

Along with Justis, IAC honored the following as top five projects:

    * The Disaster Management.gov project from the Homeland Security Department.
    * The E-Rulemaking e-government project from the Environmental Protection Agency.
    * The Federal Aviation Administration’s Knowledge Service Network.
    * The Department of Veteran Affairs’ MyHealtheVet.

IAC received 115 entries for the seventh annual award.