Assessing capability for justice information sharing

Enhanced information sharing among criminal justice agencies is a critical concern and a goal of much IT investment. Understanding agencies’ capabilities to achieve this goal is central to successful planning and investments, but indeed a difficult endeavor. The difficulty rests in part on the multiple and divergent theory frames for describing and understanding capability. This paper proposes a way of describing and assessing capabilities that goes beyond traditional resource-based models of organizational capability to include ideas from institutional and practice based perspectives. In this new perspective, capabilities are seen as multidimensional phenomena that are resource based and embedded in organizational routines, but we argue they are enacted through work practices, located in and bounded by their institutional contexts. The paper draws on literature from strategic management, information systems and organizational studies as well as practice theories to support this perspective. It then describes how this multidimensional perspective was used to develop an assessment tool for use in the criminal justice information initiatives. This is followed by a brief description of how the capability assessment tool was developed with a national panel of practitioners responsible for justice information integration initiatives and then applied within the context of one initiative. The test results illustrate the potential of the extended model in building a fuller understanding of the dimensions of organizational capability in practice and the utility of practical tools based on these dimensions.