Informa Systems Maine Criminal Justice Academy

The Maine Criminal Justice Academy (MCJA) provides training and certification for law enforcement officers and related disciplines throughout the State of Maine. When MCJA approached Informa Systems, their current training system was not web-based and exhibited a number of limitations including the inability to automate training processes. This lack of flexibility and inadequacy of their current officer information management were the main drivers for MCJA to upgrade their system to InformaOne.

Significantly throughout the implementation, Informa Systems also provided numerous additional customizations, within the program budget, to further enhance the capabilities of the system. MCJA was 'ecstatic' with the system delivered.

MCJA had over 20 years of historical records which were not optimally stored or indexed. Using the Historical Import functionality in InformaOne, Informa Systems wrote numerous translation programs to map this data to the InformaOne schema.

Law enforcement officers within the State of Maine can be attached to more than one department, commonly in rural districts. Most organization data structures have a one-to-one mapping between employees and organizations. Informa Systems had to re-architect the database to support the one-to-many mapping and re-code and test to meet this challenging one-to-many rule.

Informa Systems was able to support the complex certification process rules of MCJA. The certification process within every law enforcement agency is mostly standardized but with unique elements. For MCJA this required adding (1) grace periods, (2) the issuance of some certifications at the class start date and others at the end date and (3) storing legacy certification numbers in certification records. Informa Systems was able to quickly adapt the system to meet these requirements.

The successful implementation of the system has allowed MCJA to transition from an intranet application, based on a MS Access database to a hosted secure web-based application built on an industrial strength MS SQL server database. The system has had an enormous impact on the operations of the academy and has replaced many paperwork operations with a streamlined online version. MCJA are in the process of rolling out the system to the individual departments within the state which will result in a dramatic reduction in paperwork requests to the MCJA. Furthermore, the use of online learning has significantly reduced the cost and time involved in delivering learning to distant employees.

The Maine Criminal Justice Academy can be reached at Maine Criminal Justice Academy. Training at the Academy can be found at Academy Training Site.