Our research in this area aims to explore strategies to make IT infrastructures more responsive, adaptable, and better suited to support collaboration across agencies. This involves rethinking of enterprise systems away from more traditional "command and control" types of models to models that are more open, simple, and loosely integrated. Many existing enterprise systems require organization settings that involve contractual and well defined relation-ships. In these approaches, peers must be willing and able to invest considerable effort and specialized technical skills to participate. While these scenarios are appropriate in some circumstances, they have limited effectiveness for efforts that attempt to promote coordination of agencies with very different purposes, levels of technical capacity, and funding. In important areas, especially coordination between federal, state, and local officials, or between government agencies and various public interests, alternative approaches with greatly reduced barriers to entry and participation need to be developed.

We are investigating where more “web-like” (especially with regard to RESTful services) approaches toward inter-agency collaboration can be maximally productive. The ultimate goal of this is to both reduce overall costs of interagency coordination and to enhance public participation and transparency in the policy making processes.

Some areas in active investigation include:

• Simplify information sharing and coordination between federal, state, and local agencies with regard to law enforcement and criminal justice system information.
• Greater dynamism and flexibility in information aggregation for planning and development, particularly for transportation and energy infrastructure improvements.
• Cost effective and extensible strategies for making environmental monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, public health monitoring, and sensor data easier to disseminate, use, and aggregate. Such efforts can have important positive impacts for developing and assessing the effectiveness of policies promoting public and environmental health. In addition, such information architectures can enable emergency services to gain better awareness and understanding of disaster situations.

In all of these application areas, information security and privacy requirements must be addressed from the inception of the design of such systems. We are in active collaboration with legal and other experts to better understand the landscape of security and privacy risks so that we can develop effective mitigation strategies for these risks.