White Paper
NIEM
EFFECTIVE AND INTEROPERABLE
IMPLEMENTATION OF NIEM
Achieving effective and efficient governmental operations in typical
and emergency situations relies heavily on sharing information between
organizations across jurisdiction and domain boundaries. As a result,
there are hundreds of thousands of government organizations that have
a critical need to share information. Traditionally, these agencies have
operated under significant autonomy, which has given them considerable
control over their internal business process and technology choices.
While this autonomy has allowed each agency to optimize process
and technology to more effectively meet the unique challenges of its
stakeholders and environment, the same autonomy has created a very
diverse and heterogeneous information sharing environment. As a result,
the only way to achieve efficient information sharing in this environment
is through interoperability.
One of the main challenges to information sharing in a diverse,
heterogeneous environment is the silos of information and functionality
typical to this environment. Further, the systems responsible for
the information and functionality are implemented using different
technologies, networks, hardware and software. This usually results
in information-sharing realized as point-to-point integration between
disparate systems, which is extremely costly to implement, manage and
maintain.
This paper presents an approach to architecting and implementing
information sharing solutions that leverage the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM) as its main building block to promote
interoperability. Additional benefits of this implementation approach are
agility, scalability and cost efficiency through the leveraging of existing
investments and the reuse of information sharing assets.
One of the first challenges of information sharing across domain and
jurisdiction boundaries is the diversity of information government
organizations collect and process. The traditional autonomy