In a major initiative sponsored by the FBI and its criminal justice partners, Raytheon completed the latest increment of the National Data Exchange (N-DEx) criminal justice information sharing system.

N-DEx, now fully operational, is managed by the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) and allows 200,000 investigators in more than 18,000 local, state, tribal and federal criminal justice agencies to share information on criminal cases.

N-DEx gives the law-enforcement community intuitive ways to rapidly search and visualize data, new insights into the data's non-obvious relationships and easy ways to collaborate as virtual investigative teams.

"From incident reports to incarceration data, N-DEx gives users an easy way to search, link, analyze and share criminal justice data on a national basis in ways never before possible," said Lynn Dugle, President of Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems business. "N-DEx's agile development approach and open, scalable, standards-based architecture provide a system that meets the long-term requirements of the FBI to provide efficient, cost-effective support for the law enforcement community now and in the future."

While supporting the information sharing needs of all levels of law enforcement, N-DEx will ensure security and protect privacy in the handling, storing and sharing of sensitive incident-based information. Also, the comprehensive set of Web services delivered through the latest increment of N-DEx further enhances the system's existing features, including the production of information alerts about persons of interest when new records are entered into the system.

As N-DEx continues to rapidly expand across the nation, users are estimated to make about 6 million queries a day through the system, which is similar in scale to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system, also operated by FBI CJIS. These queries will be at the heart of the critical mission of moving key investigative information across disparate systems and jurisdictional boundaries into the hands of those who need to know.

The FBI utilized the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center's (NITAAC) CIO-SP2i Government Wide Acquisition (GWAC) program in making the initial award to Raytheon.