The great Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC) held their annual meeting immediately following the 2009 Court Technology Conference in Denver and one of the powerful items on their agenda was to go around the room and ask how technology has helped to weather the recent financial storms. The responses were revealing.

Here are a few …

• Ask staff how to regain one hour per day – some suggested taming Internet surfing, social media and email as great places to start. This is an odd juxtaposition of technology helping and hindering productivity.
• Move archived files (especially microfiche files) online – staff complained that helping folks to use the fiche readers alone was a major effort.
• Install video equipment in court to use both as an alternative means to capture the verbatim record and for videoconference training and meetings.
• Use Voice over IP to reduce long distance telephone charges.
• Redefine the role of court staff into two career tracks: management and “professional decision resource” in a judicial support capacity.
• One jurisdiction created 16 business reengineering teams with an IT staff person on each.
• Create “skinny” files that rely as much as possible on electronic processing – in this application, just the essential documents were housed in a physical file jacket, mostly for judicial processing.
• Raise revenue using a variety of compliance techniques.
• Centralize paper submission functions and use them as the gateway to migrate to electronic files.
• Use open source software instead of costly name brand products (e.g., Open Office vs MS Office).
• Use and encourage filing agencies to migrate to e-citations as much as possible.
• Delegate routine judicial functions such as distraint (overdue tax) warrants to clerical staff and automate the process as much as possible.
• Beef up data transfers in as many applications as possible.
• Enhance the courts website identifying high touch points with customers as prime applications.
• Add “auto-populate” features to case management systems to cut down on the need for excess key stroke data entry.
• Migrate to Paper-on-Demand.

These are wonderful places to start. Anyone wish to add to the list??

Photo credit = Microsoft clip art

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Court Management, Court Performance, Finances, Technology, The Future.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.