Microsoft BizTalk ServerCustomer Solution Case Study

Western Australia DotAG/DCS Improves Interoperability; Streamlines Workflows

OverviewCountry or Region: Western AustraliaIndustry: Government

Customer ProfileThe Department of the Attorney General (DotAG) provides high quality and accessible justice, legal, registry, guardianship and trustee services to the community and the Western Australian Government.

Business SituationLack of capability to electronically exchange consistent criminal justice information between business areas within DotAG/DCS and external agencies.

SolutionOriginally utilizing Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000, DotAG’s upgrade to BizTalk Server 2006 facilitated electronic interchange – integrating business areas within DotAG/DCS and across agencies in WA.

Benefits Enterprise-level scalability Eliminated manual processes Standardized messaging Low cost entry to services

"(BizTalk) has been a key tool for integrating disparate applications and systems across the justice system. It has enabled information exchange to improve service effectiveness and minimize risk."

Ray Warnes, Executive Director, Court and Tribunal Services, DotAG

In early 2002, the Department of the Attorney General and Corrective Services (DotAG/DCS) and the Western Australia Police (WAPol) embarked on a project to improve the way records of offences were being sent to the courts. Instead of sending paper records between DotAG/DCS and WAPol a system built on Microsoft BizTalk Server was devised to facilitate the transfer of electronic briefs from WAPol into the Courts.

Over the last few years, Microsoft BizTalk Server has paved the way for numerous points of integration between DotAG/DCS internal business systems and other agencies. Today, data such as briefs, outcomes, parole, infringements, court orders, and charges are readily accessible between traditionally siloed information systems, improving information sharing and streamlining processes across business areas within DotAG/DCS and external agencies.

SituationThe Department of the Attorney General and Corrective Services (DotAG/DCS) began operations in February 2006, the result of dividing the former Department of Justice into two agencies.

DotAG provides high quality and accessible justice, legal, registry, guardianship and trustee services to meet the needs of the community and the Western Australian Government, while DCS looks after offenders in the State's 14 prisons and 2 detention centers as well as citizens on probation, parole and other community orders.

As a proportion of the services performed by DotAG/DCS involve offences and other criminal matters, DotAG's Courts and Tribunal Services needed to facilitate the transfer of information between itself and the Western Australia Police (WAPol). For example, when police officers create a charge brief (information about a person who has been charged with an offence), it needs to be sent to the courts, and the details of the outcome sent back to the police.

Since both agencies operated their information systems independently, charge briefs were being sent manually by the police to the courts and duplicated by a court officer, resulting in intensive labor and large volumes of paper changing hands.

Building be-spoke point-to-point messaging would have made the entire infrastructure unnecessarily complex and would present scalability and modification issues over time, and went against the core

tenet of the Electronic Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) to standardize information flow across agencies.

In order to strengthen the interoperability between DotAG/DCS and external business partners as well as internal business sectors, it was decided that a robust message and middleware architecture layer was needed. Known as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), this layer established within DotAG/DCS provides the fundamental services to "translate" different messages originating from multiple governmental systems into standardized formats, so that business areas can tap onto these messages when their workflows demand it.

SolutionIn order to build the electronic interchange between the Western Australian Police and the Courts and Tribunal Services, DotAG/DCS enlisted the help of Microsoft partner BroadReach Consulting. Since early 2002, BroadReach Consulting had been actively developing interoperability applications for DotAG/DCS (then the Department of Justice) using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. Since then, BroadReach Consulting has upgraded the system to BizTalk Server 2006 – allowing DotAG/DCS to enjoy a well-facilitated

24

"BizTalk Server and the Microsoft Application Platform as a whole have been instrumental in the numerous process improvements we've been able to make over the years. The architecture has grown and matured over many years of operation and has been so successful that we've had numerous requests from other government agencies to use our design and implementation patterns as best practice.”

Bob Berg, Director Shared Information Service Directorate, DotAG/DCS

electronic interchange to enable the integration of business areas within DotAG/DCS and across agencies in Western Australia.

"It was important for us to build an underlying foundation that could be extended to meet the needs of other agencies in the future, no matter their existing information systems or data formats," said Greg Kirk, Principal Consultant, BroadReach Consulting. "BizTalk Server provides a host of technology and application adapters out-of-the-box, meaning that we could integrate easily with existing technologies such as Web Sphere and Oracle."

BenefitsFrom its humble beginnings as a means to link the police services and the courts, the BizTalk message and middleware capability has become a production-critical capability and a cornerstone of the architecture stack deployed by DotAG and DCS. "This new architecture has helped DotAG/DCS deliver a streamlined, consistent messaging infrastructure for all agencies," said Bruce Davies, Manager Infrastructure Services, DotAG/DCS.

"Since the initial successful implementation of this interchange over 80 more workflows have been created between the internal and external business areas," said Kirk.

Benefits of the Enterprise Service Bus include:

Cost savings and elimination of manual processesThe message interchange has made the transmission of data between agencies

swift and seamless, with plenty of room to accommodate growth in traffic. "Looking back at the very first integration point we created in 2002, approximately 650,000 briefs have been sent to the courts from the WA Police and over 800,000 outcomes have been sent back to WAPol from the courts. Trying to achieve that with manual processes would simply not have been sustainable," said Kirk.

A unified platform for interoperabilityBizTalk Server has enabled DotAG/DCS to connect existing applications (regardless of the platform) and to compose, expose, and consume new services. "Rather than tear down and build new applications from scratch, we've been able to extend the life of our existing investments, while minimizing the cost of integrating new systems into the fold," said Kirk.

Improved monitoring and auditBizTalk Server as the enterprise service bus for DotAG/DCS delivers a scalable robust message monitoring and auditing capability that previously had not existed within the agencies. BizTalk enables message retry, alternate routings and workflow monitoring, making secure business to business process delivery mechanisms much more streamlined and manageable.

34

"This new architecture has helped DotAG/DCS deliver a streamlined, consistent messaging infrastructure for all agencies."

Bruce Davies, Manager of Infrastructure Services, DotAG/DCS

Support for future processesThe Enterprise Service Bus delivered by BizTalk enables interaction between services and interfaces that might be mismatched, or that might change over time. For example, DotAG court document formats may evolve to include additional data. With BizTalk, modifications can be made to accommodate these changes without affecting the way existing applications consume this data.

Looking ahead, the system developed by DotAG/DCS will enable further expansion to other agencies and workflows. "BizTalk Server and the Microsoft Application Platform as a whole have been instrumental in the numerous process improvements we've been able to make over the years. The architecture has grown and matured over many years of operation and has been so successful that we've had numerous requests from other government agencies to use our design and implementation patterns as best practice” said Bob Berg, Director Shared Information Service Directorate, DotAG/DCS.Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

44

For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Western Australia Department of the Attorney General (DotAG) products and services, call +61 08 9264 1600 or visit the Web site at: http://www.dotag.wa.gov.au

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published July 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Office− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

2007 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard

Edition