Last month, AIIM, the global community of information professionals, announced the winners of the 2012 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Awards. And San Joaquin County, California won in the small company category for 1-100 employees. The Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award was established to recognize excellence in the area of information management. "Best practice" denotes a standard of excellence that has been achieved with an organization and refers to a process that can be quantified, adapted and repeated.

Like many counties, San Joaquin County, California, was faced with huge challenges due to decreasing funds and staff, including decreased cost of building capability. It needed to streamline processes, cut costs per activity, modernize and strengthen the infrastructure, and adopt new technology and standards such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). The Integrated Justice Information System (IJIS) provides a Web-based system to link more than 650,000 residents, 18 agencies countywide and other law enforcement systems nationwide. The county’s modernization initiative focused on replacing its outdated warrant system, implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) to simplify integration between county law and justice systems, deploying Business Process Management (BPM), Case Management with content management, and Web technologies from Oracle. A critical part of their success has been the proper alignment of our Strategic Vision to the way the organization was enabled to plan and execute (and continues to execute) their modernization project.

Congratulations to San Joaquin County!