At that same time, the head of programming for Miami-Dade's criminal justice system reported to Feuer that it would take eight man-years to encode the old database with all the necessary protocols to achieve the desired results. "That's when we realized we had a big problem," Feuer says, "because obviously we didn't have eight years to pull off this project." Feuer and his team regrouped, reexamined the problem and came back with Web services as a development solution.

The county mandate to streamline services and standardize the technology landscape, combined with the urgency of getting the police department's database-access project up and running as quickly as possible, helped steer Zito and Feuer more quickly toward Web services. "We were going to [use Web services as an integration platform] in the next fiscal year, but the police access project moved it up," Feuer says.

The ability to develop applications as Web services and share those applications with multiple departments, to reuse processes and coded logic, as well as to conform to emerging industry standards such as simple object access protocol and XML, were also significant reasons for choosing the technology. "There are a lot of unique processes that have been coded into the mainframe over many years," says Zito. "Re-coding logic that we could potentially be using over and over again just wasn't a prudent approach." Using Web services to develop applications that support county services is now a key strategy for Miami-Dade, say both Zito and Feuer, and it will be an ongoing process.

The police department's application came at a provident time, as that type of system had similar technological and process requirements to those being considered by Zito and Feuer to satisfy their countywide strategy. "We were looking at Web services as an integration point between disparate architectures like .Net and J2EE," says Feuer. "I was trying to get ahead of the curve to integrate those two architectures, so I was researching Web services. I see it as a mechanism to allow us to share data between disparate systems and get information from multiple sources."

That's just how the police department's information access system will work. Once a police officer has detained an individual, he can use the vehicle-mounted laptop computer to execute a query. That query will spawn another query with Florida's statewide system and still another to an FBI database, known as the National Crime Information Center. After checking all these databases, the system will quickly return a consolidated response to inform the officer whether he has detained someone who was simply driving too fast or is a wanted fugitive. The police department application is expected to be up and running by March 2004.