Participants in successful integration initiatives have formed strategic partnerships within the justice community, beyond the justice community and with the private sector. In the integration initiatives studied, participants consider success to be more dependent on forming strong relationships and building trust than on using any particular technology. Using strategic partnerships was found to be effective in helping teams deal with the complexity of the environment. Some projects found that partnerships with end users were critical to their success. These partnerships resulted in access to multiple perspectives on justice business processes and the use of integrated information. In addition, technical assistance provided by vendors appears in several initiatives as a success factor. A positive effect of the partnership with private vendors was the impact on IT and data incompatibility issues. In one case, public-private partnerships resulted in an improvement of technical expertise concerning a specific piece of hardware or software.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had success in using technical knowledge from the private sector in developing its integration initiative. It has also had success with outsourcing its technological support to outside companies. In Minnesota, the executive director of Minnesota Business Partnership was able to successfully explain to the State Legislature how applying corporate "best practices" could help the State with its criminal justice information integration initiative.