The Charles County Sheriff's Office submitted a case study on it's implementation of a record-keeping system using personal data assistants (PDAs), and the study has officially become part of the prestigious Computerworld Honors Collection. The collection was formally presented to the Global Archives April 3 at San Francisco City Hall and the Charles County Sheriff's Office was honored with the Medal of Achievement on June 6 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
Sybase nominated the Charles County Sheriff's Office for inclusion in the 2005 Government and Non-Profit Organizations. The case study is now part of a collection of case studies from 54 countries.
The 2005 Collection, which will be archived in libraries, museums, and academic and research institutions around the world, will serve as primary source material for scholars and as a resource for individuals who hope to use information technology to create solutions to address their own challenges.
The Sheriff's Office began using PDAs in 2003. Law enforcement has always involved a lot of paperwork, but in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks and in response to a mandate from the state of Maryland against racial profiling, the Charles County Sheriff's Office is now required to collect an enormous amount of new information and report that information to the State Justice Analysis Center and the U.S. Office of Homeland Security. These new requirements were burying the Sheriff's Office in paperwork. To address this situation, the Sheriff's Office created and deployed an automated information collection and management solution to replace its existing time consuming, paper-intensive field information report process. Using iAnywhere mobile technology, the Sheriff's Office developed a secure solution that allows officers to capture data on PDAs, automatically synchronize that data with a centralized database and create reports in a fraction of the time it previously took when its system was entirely paper-based.
From more than 300 nominations submitted this year by the 100 industry chairmen and CEO's who serve on the program's Chairmen's Committee, 160 were honored as laureates at the ceremony. Of these, 50 were chosen by a panel of distinguished judges to attend the June 6, awards gala in Washington, D.C.
Case studies from the 2005 Computerworld Honors Collection will be available at http://www.cwheroes.org, the official site of the Computerworld Honors Program, where the entire Collection is available to scholars, researchers and the general public worldwide. In addition, the Collection is distributed annually to the Honors Program's Archival Partners around the world. These partners include some of the world's finest research and scholarly institutions, each of which has generously agreed to include the Collection in its archives.