CJIS Group: Linking industry to Funding

A SOLUTIONS SHOWCASE

Jul 15, 2011

When it comes to providing the public safety system with all the resources it needs to protect the public and provide a secure and resilient community, all hands must be on deck to help. For all levels of government, this means creating policy that balances risk and public cost. For industries that have capabilities relating to public safety, this means being able to provide solutions that balance profitability and competitiveness. Somewhere, a bridge must span government requirements to access state-of-the-art solutions that include know-how and technology.

Fourteen years ago, a Florida-based law enforcement professional saw the need to connect the two worlds of requirement and integrated solutions. P.J. Doyle had more than 27 years of practical experience in criminal justice information and in various law enforcement fields. Starting his career as a highway patrol officer, he moved through undercover work and on to management where he headed an organized crime bureau. At the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Doyle created the third largest criminal justice information system in the nation. Gaining proficiency at the bits and bytes did not distract him from staying plugged into the major national law enforcement groups for he remains active in all these groups today – 17 years after his “retirement” from active duty.

His expertise with technology and his previous public safety involvement has allowed Doyle to create a unique and valuable national service that links public safety and criminal justice requirements with industry solutions. He established the CJIS Group, a company that succeeds in linking industry solutions suppliers with State and Local (S&L) public safety and criminal justice agencies. “We went where nobody had gone before,” says Doyle. “We established the link between distributed S&L needs and the capabilities that industry providers could uniquely supply.”

The CJIS Group tackles this challenging mission head on with a service called CJIS Premier. With this program, research is gathered by speaking directly with key decision makers from Justice and Public Safety agencies including Courts, Corrections, Fire, Emergency Management, Law Enforcement, Public Safety, and Health and Human Services. CJIS Premier provides the most detailed, comprehensive Information Technology research available within this arena; and again, it’s done at the all important S&L levels as well as the federal level. The program currently contains over 14,000 reports, including over 1,800 Pre-RFP opportunities; 2,300 Agency profiles, and over 3,000 Awarded Reports.

Another service, CJIS Lite, provides research results from over 80,000 pages of government, mayoral, procurement and newspaper sites on a 24-hour basis. Leads are then filtered by the research team and e-mailed to clients based on specific needs and interests. CJIS Lite currently contains over 6,000 lead opportunities.

Overall, CJIS has managed to provide services to public safety agencies as well as its industry clients. For the S&L agencies nation-wide, the CJIS Group monitors federal grant programs that can be used by state public safety government agencies for planning, procurement and implementation of systems and technologies. The S&L agency maps its needs to available federal grant money through webinars and newsletters. CJIS Group fulfills a critical need by linking local agency requirements to federal financial support.