On February 2, 2007 the WIJIS Justice Gateway (finally) went live. In the works for more than six years (but only in development for about 13 months), the Wisconsin justice community's vision of a seamless way to share incident and investigative information finally became reality in 2007. Not only that, but with implementation of our Workflow Engine the WIJIS development team also found time to get back to the original vision of seamless electronic exchange of documents, which had been tested prior to 2001 in the Model County project.

In 2008, our Project Director, Jim Pingel, will be stepping up to a greater challenge, serving the US Department of Justice in a one-year fellowship with the National Information Exchange Model project. He will continue to be involved in WIJIS projects at a high level. However Jeff Sartin and Yogesh Chawla will take over the day-to-day administrative/fiscal and project management/development operations, respectively. This change represents an opportunity to continue to raise Wisconsin's profile as a leader in justice information sharing. It also gives the people who are already responsible for most of WIJIS' real, on-the-ground successes to take on the leadership roles they've earned.

Now, the big news: 2008 will be the year that the Gateway becomes a tool that truly spans the entire criminal justice community. Up until now the Gateway has provided access to law enforcement data only. In the first half of 2008, we will expand the Gateway to include data from the 66 (and growing) counties who use the DA-PROTECT system for prosecution case management.

Stay tuned for more updates on that project in the near future.