Justice departments must demonstrate outcomes (not just services delivered) amidst a rather complex landscape.
“The Ministry of Justice team is on a mission to deliver faster, firmer, and more human service,” said Peter Coussement, Senior Advisor to the Minister, which is no small endeavor when you look at the backdrop:
- Justice has a huge ecosystem of stakeholders. Going back to the adoption example, think about all the people who are typically involved: aside from the judges, prosecutors and clerks, there are legal guardians, biological parents, social workers, lawyers, bailiffs, court appointed experts, translators, teachers, counselors, police, all types of inspection services, and more.
- Each of these teams has their own data, stored in different formats, and managed by different legacy IT systems, which means more time spent collecting paper forms, deciphering handwriting, correcting errors, and uploading data manually. “In one of our applications for Supreme Court cases, ‘Spain’ was spelled 70 different ways across 30 years of cases because of acronyms, languages, etc. That’s challenging to pull data against,” said Coussement. When laws change, these systems make it that much harder to maintain transparency.
- Then, take into account the complex nature legal cases tend to pose and you have quite the challenging landscape in which to deliver faster, firmer, more human service.
“We manage a range of different case types across our entities, meaning we the Ministry have 15 different types of case management systems,” said Jimmy De Laet, CIO. “Adoption, criminal cases, divorce, and more; no two cases are alike, no two case types are alike, and no two timelines are alike. You need to have a global view, to be able to evaluate our caseload holistically. Which means you need to be able to get more granular with the data.”
As the team was starting to discuss next steps, a couple events happened. (1) Coronavirus hit, which forced judges to work from home. If they were missing a file, they had to go pick up the hard copy at the court building or wait for a chauffeur to deliver it before they could issue a judgment and close the case. “They really started to understand that a paper-based system was holding them back. I have been a public prosecutor for 15 years, and this is the first time I saw everyone understand the impact digitization (or lack thereof) can have on the work,” said Coussement. Following that, (2) Next Generation EU was launched by the European Commission, which made large amounts of funding available to stimulate various parts of the economy. Some of that was allocated to digitizing justice – for example, court case management, creating searchable databases, upgrading cybersecurity, and enabling better statistical analysis. “Together with the cabinet, we created a temporary office called the Digital Transformation Office that brought together a team of people from across the business to collaborate and to take action,” said De Laet.
