The town I grew up in, and the next town are connected by a road (shocking, unusual, I know). There was an 8 month period where the police departments and politicians all agreed that there should be a way to pass high urgency alerts back and forth, in case there’s someone fleeing along that road, or anything like that.

It was eventually decided that the viable ways were:

1. a desk agent would fax over a document and call to notify/confirm about the event.

2. one department would have to replace some substantial portion of their IT system so it could work with the other system.

3. they could pay for a custom solution, maybe.

They settled on option 1, and it worked. Every time I hear politicians talk about sharing information across organizations, I think back to a working meeting with two vendors going down a list of protocols and standards, eventually deciding there was no common ground. It’s been made difficult, and no one in the industry appears to want to fix that.