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Montana officials defend slow, methodical rollout of statewide justice data warehouse
Summary
Board of Crime Control staff and project leads told the Criminal Justice Oversight Council that data integration for the Justice Data Warehouse is progressing through county pilots, API work and a planned data catalog — but cautioned it is a long, engineered effort that will scale only after initial code is perfected.
Janice Fries, director of the Statistical Analysis Center at the Montana Board of Crime Control, told the Criminal Justice Oversight Council that the Justice Data Warehouse has taken deliberate steps to collect and standardize state criminal justice records.
Fries said the warehouse already holds Department of Corrections and Office of Public Defender data, and that Ravalli County law‑enforcement records are in Snowflake while Gallatin County work is paused pending an RMS upgrade by vendor CentralSquare. She identified hiring needs — a project manager and a second data‑warehouse architect funded under HB 117 — as critical to expand beyond pilot counties.
Adam Carpenter of the project team framed the pace as intentional. He said the team is writing code now to handle CentralSquare’s multiple decades of changing formats so that the work will be repeatable for the roughly 40 other CentralSquare counties. “This is a feature, not a bug,” Carpenter said, describing the engineering up front that enables later scale.
Fries described procurement of Alation, a data catalog system requested in HB 117, as a next step to document data dictionaries and enable non‑technical users to understand what fields and definitions are available. That catalog, she said, will help both developers and policymakers decide which future questions the warehouse can answer.
The council heard technical details about MOU progress (fully executed with Valley County agencies, DOC, OPD; partial signoffs with Gallatin agencies) and efforts with SITSD to create a scalable process for counties with different network environments. Council members asked for follow‑up documentation on how the warehouse will track provenance and who will have access to sensitive fields.
Public comment from Mae Simmons praised the team’s work and urged patience, noting the project’s technical complexity. Council members said the next steps should include a clear deliverables timeline, the roster of fields expected in the initial public queries, and transparency on privacy protections for individuals in the combined data.
