Our approach to meeting the Causeway objectives is set out in four principles:

• All information used by more than one organisation will be captured at the point it is first used and thereafter shared electronically.
• The Criminal Justice Organisations (CJOs) will retain the right to design, build and operate their own business systems but they will meet centrally agreed data, communications and security standards.
• Integration should exploit existing systems where possible.
• Security & Privacy must be maintained.

This meant that the criminal justice process created and moved huge quantities of paper. Storing, updating, moving and using that information electronically has fundamentally changed the way in which the system operates. We needed to ensure that the criminal justice organisations were ready for that change, had thought through all its implications and had designed ways of working that ensured the potential benefits of the new technology were actually achieved.

To this end Causeway had to:

• Work with the justice organisations to identify co-operative ways of working that will fully exploit the potential of the new technologies;
• Identify the best ways of capturing and sharing information electronically;
• Support the implementation of computer applications being implemented by the justice organisations which can store, retrieve and use the shared data in ways that the individual organisations would find most useful;
• Facilitate changes in the organisation and working practices of the justice organisations to ensure that all the expected benefits of the new information system could be achieved;
• Help the justice organisations to integrate the business change plans required to use the shared electronic information with the many other change initiatives that were also taking place.

The work of the programme is divided into four phases.

• Phase 0: Planning
• Phase 1: Analysis
• Phase 2: Procurement
• Phase 3: Implementation

By June 2005 the programme has successfully completed Phases 0, 1 and 2 and has begun Phase 3 with the successful implementation of the first part of the Data Sharing Mechanism.

The Procurement Process

The procurement process recognised that there were potentially different ways in which technology could be deployed to meet the programmes aims and allowed the private sector bidders to put forward their own proposed solutions.

In August 2003, Fujitsu were awarded the contract to develop and manage the supporting technology. Fujitsu's solution uses a centralised information store enhanced by an Intelligent Data Exchange:

Inplementation

Phase 3, implementation has been planned to synchronise with the implementations of the justice organisations' own line of business systems which will link into Causeway.

The Technology Model: Fujitsu's Solution

• The centralised information store contains the common data model (agreed by all the justice organisations) containing structured data. It will also store unstructured data including copies of documents, pictures and voice and video material;
• The Intelligent Data Exchange contains the business rules agreed by the justice organisations for sharing information. This includes who can see what information at what stage in the criminal justice process and rules for escalating critical actions;
• The model is underpinned by a highly resilient, secure, centralised infrastructure.

To learn more about the technology solution click here.

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