(Source: Wireless News)
DataDirect Technologies, a provider of data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software, announced that the State of Maryland Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention (GOCCP) and Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) is using DataDirect Shadow with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition as an essential technology solution behind its Law Enforcement Dashboard.
Commissioned by Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, the Law Enforcement Dashboard is used by the State of Maryland's law- enforcement personnel and agencies to lookup the criminal history of defendants and offenders. Prior to the creation of the Dashboard, the state had separate databases for its Division of Corrections, Division of Parole, State Police Gun Registry and Sex Offender Registry - each with its own sign-on requirements and search criteria for information retrieval. This made cross-referencing systems and confirming identification and criminal history information a complex and time consuming task. Recognizing the existing infrastructure hindered the state's law enforcement activities, Governor O'Malley directed the GOCCP to collaborate with the DPSCS to create a single view of people's criminal backgrounds.
Because the State of Maryland's law enforcement data exists across multiple databases and platforms, DPSCS sought a tool that would simplify the data mining and querying of each database. They chose the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition to provide the BI platform and Web portal for the Law Enforcement Dashboard. Secondly, they needed a middleware tool that could provide standards-based access to mainframe data in real-time as opposed to warehousing the data. DataDirect Shadow was selected because of its ability to provide direct SQL access to the data stored in legacy Information Management Systems (IMS) and Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) databases. DataDirect Shadow helped lower the latency time of the joint solution through its ability to transform non-relational mainframe data into a relational format compatible with the Oracle BI platform - thus eliminating the need for a data repository.
"We did not want to pull dedicated IT and development resources away from existing projects by requiring system owners to write interfaces or standard APIs for various applications," said Ron Brothers, CIO of DPSCS's Information Technology and Communications Division. "DataDirect Shadow allowed us to deal with multiple databases on multiple platforms in an easy and intuitive fashion.
