Okay, how is this for innovation, then? Microsoft and the Illinois State Police have been collaborating on a project called "FusionX" which is designed to provide an architectural and best practice procedures template for sharing and tracking terrorist intelligence. This fulfills a Department of Homeland Security mandate calling for "fusion" centers regionally which will act as clearinghouses for terrorist intelligence and improve communication and coordination between responsible agencies gathering and acting on that information.

The system is built around Microsoft's Office system, particularly SharePoint server (which will no doubt lead to a variety of tired jokes revolving around the possibility of your local 911 system falling victim to the Blue Screen of Death), which doesn't really sound like anything new or interesting; you could come up with something like that yourself (yes, you, sitting there, right now) in about ten minutes using Sharepoint off the shelf. The more interesting part is the backend built around BizTalk Server R2 which is apparently being used to create XML based interfaces to a variety of database servers from differently agencies and applications.

If I'm not mistaken, this has the distinct whiff of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) about it. Those of us wondering about Microsoft's commitment to delivering useful, non-proprietary tools to construct SOA or whether BizTalk server was being shoehorned into a niche that it might not actually be well-formed for, may be seeing the first glimmering of answers to those questions.

More about the FusionX project (although not much more) is available here.