Justice
Justice is an invaluable human right – but it’s good to know that modern data management and exchange can make it more efficient and lower the cost to us all.
We’ve been involved with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) since 2002, as part of a 13-year outsource. As well as providing IT services to all 9,000 of their staff and streamlining processes, we’re working together to give staff access to the accurate, timely information that keeps our legal system functioning.
Our ultimate aim? To ensure that data is input and held only once but can be accessed as often as it’s needed by every staff member with the relevant clearance. This approach has been described as joined-up justice – we see it as cutting out layers of time-consuming and expensive activity and, more importantly, ensuring that mistakes don’t happen simply because the right information isn’t accessible.
One fundamental project developed a case management system (CMS) that supports everyone involved in a prosecution – lawyers, caseworkers and administrative staff – from start to finish, scheduling tasks and minimising the resources absorbed by administrative activities.
Our witness management system (WMS) builds on this platform to allow police witness care officers and CPS staff to work collaboratively, share case and witness information and establish the needs and concerns of each witness. As one witness care officer puts it, “We have the information we need at our fingertips. This allows us to concentrate on helping victims and witnesses.”
CJ Know-How, meanwhile, is a secure, web-based system that allows members of the justice community, from prison officers to policy-makers, to see the performance data from all justice organisations, prioritise initiatives and share best practice.
We’ve been working with the Ministry of Justice since 2006 to update applications vital to the running and administration of the oldest justice system in the world. Our main achievements include: a secure modern infrastructure, a dramatically reduced number of servers, effective disaster recovery and service savings. We’ve even reduced carbon emissions, saving the equivalent of four jumbo jet crossings a year.
But the initiative that’s recently hit the headlines is the move away from dispersed, often paper-based, case files towards the ideal of a single electronic case file that any practitioner with the appropriate clearance can access. Our extension contract with the CPS will include support to achieve this and is also one of two that expects to cut 25 per cent from the CPS’s current ICT running costs.
Opportunities for greater efficiency at less expense don’t end there. We deliver the Buying Solutions Payroll Services Framework, which has been specifically designed for the public sector and cuts payroll costs by as much as 30 per cent.
