The "business" of warrant and disposition management is complex. Multiple organizations involved in different capacities with distinct needs, dependencies, requirements, and information systems create a structured chaos to accomplish what the public considers a simple task. When approaching warrant or disposition management, it’s useful to think about how the information about specific events or actions requires certain stakeholders to make decisions. Raising simple questions about a distinct function, e.g., issuing a warrant, reveals who does what and why. This process begins to distill the complexities into more granular components is called Business Capabilities.
A key benefit in focusing on business capabilities is that while organizational structures and processes can and will change, the essential business capabilities and requirements tend to remain constant over time.
A business capability abstracts the people, processes, and procedures associated with a given business function. The decomposition of the business into capabilities provides the decoupling of business activities from these processes and procedures to identify the distinct technology interfaces to share required information for each capability.
Capability models provide a visual representation of the entities involved in each business function, the activities associated with each function, and the outcomes of those activities.
While a warrant is an order of a court authorizing a law enforcement officer to arrest and bring a person before a judge, the act of executing that order requires more than the judge's signature. It requires the request, issuance, service, query, update, and recall of the warrant. Each of these business functions involve multiple stakeholders and multiple computer systems that need to work together to carry out the judge's order.
The process of reporting accurate disposition records begins long before the court announces its decision. The business functions associated with dispositions involve the actions of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and courts. Each stakeholder plays a role in ensuring that disposition-related records are reported in a timely manner and that criminal history records are complete.