Perhaps...
... If they spent the money on Developers wages rather than feeding their Fat Cat friends profit buckets then they might get better results.
Flinging £700m at courts' IT won't increase efficiency, says NAO
An ambitious plan to modernise Blighty's criminal justice system via a £700m digitisation programme will not cure its increasing inefficiencies, a government spending watchdog report has found. According to a report by the National Audit Office today, the £2bn annual spend on the justice system is "not currently delivering …
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 07:41 GMT Steve Davies 3
Lawyers get more efficient?
Yeah and pigs might fly.
As they are paid per nanosecond why would they ever see the need to smarte up their act? That's just cutting of their own income. As more and more people become qualified the less incentive there is to become efficient. Just string it all out as long as possible then you get more £££ at the end.
Unless you were the foolish firm to agree on a fixed price with SCO for their doomed glory hunt against IBM.
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 17:26 GMT Vic
Re: Lawyers get more efficient?
Unless you were the foolish firm to agree on a fixed price with SCO for their doomed glory hunt against IBM.
That wouldn't have worked - David Boies is renowned for his lack of IT skills.
One has to wonder[1] why he took on a case like SCO v. IBM...
Vic.
[1] Not really. The word "Kerching" seems to sum it up nicely.
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 09:20 GMT John Smith 19
Oh dear. Let's see if this works better than last several times.
There are various problems with this
People say it's a "comms" problem because they can't get standardization on the data they pass so they resort to email (at one time IIRC it was faxes, so I suppose that's an improvement.
Most people don't realize that a lot of the process consists of filling in forms or following a schedule set by courts or the laws they enforce. forms + calendar + database --> case management system. See https://www.oyezforms.co.uk/word for people who do this.
But everyone's CMS is different, although I think they could be made to send and receive standardized emails. So you're needing maybe both human and API interfaces depending on the volume being handled.
On the govt side you've got high & county courts, police (multiple), CPS (different offices), probation service, prisons (130+ IIRC) and of course European I/O for Europol arrest warrants..
And let us not forget the need for serious audit trails to identify exactly who added (or changed or deleted) what entries at what time.
This is presided over by Michael Gov and the Home Sec is Teresa May, neither of whom like each other.
OTOH I have used the web based Small Claims system in the UK and found it worked fairly well at accepting my documents, tracking the calendar for court dates and ensuring everyone was at court on the day.
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 13:14 GMT Halfmad
Re: Anything can be fixed with a new IT System!
Working in the NHS I can say this - most people here don't think the answer is always a phone call to IT away..
However many managers do, right now we're implementing an electronic patient record, yet we're not properly looking at existing ways of working and how those should/must CHANGE to go electronic, we're also not training staff to handle the electronic record who currently handle the paper ones. The result? will be expensive to fix and mistakes will be made which could have been avoided.
People seem to forget that an IT system is only as good as the processes and work you put in before, during and post development, not just on the system but those that impact on how it's used daily.
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 17:41 GMT Vic
Re: Anything can be fixed with a new IT System!
yet we're not properly looking at existing ways of working and how those should/must CHANGE to go electronic
And therein lies the nub of most of these problems.
Systems develop because, in the main, they work. Trying to change those systems gets you two results :-
- You transform a working, if kludgy, system into a "clean", but non-functional one
- Users push back against the enforced changes to their workstyle
Either of these is a recipe for disaster. Together, they create yet another embarassing Government IT cockup.
Vic.
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Tuesday 1st March 2016 13:45 GMT Otto is a bear.
And naturally
Poor processes implemented by an IT system will still be poor processes, no matter how good the IT system is.
Coming up on 40 years in IT, I still marvel at the idea that people think IT solves anything, it doesn't it just automates processes cockups or no at a rate faster than any human can do it.
Who said "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer" or
"Computers only do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do"
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Wednesday 2nd March 2016 10:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Harder than the NHS....
Delivering a case Mgmt system into the CJS is fraught with issues but a key one is that there is no common definition of what a case is... To the police, a case is prob something like an event with a time and a place. For the prison service it's a person. Security definitions across the system are not the same: police legitimately fear that revealing the name of a witness could endanger their life, to the courts it's a basic bit of data that their transporting contractor needs to have to get the right people to the court. These differences (and there are hundreds more) may seem trivial, but they make computerising the CJS even more difficult than the NHS. Then add in the fact that the CJS is a collective noun not an organisation, that the governance of each element sometimes has the effect of prohibiting collaboration, that part of it basically wants to catch 'em, lock 'em up and thrown away the ke, while other parts wants to administer justice and you have a fascinating precious melting pot that is damn difficult (not impossible) to align behind a common objective.
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Wednesday 2nd March 2016 18:11 GMT Vic
Re: Harder than the NHS....
To the police, a case is prob something like an event with a time and a place. For the prison service it's a person. Security definitions across the system are not the same
What you're describing here is actually a fairly simple database; having granular permissions is commonplace.
The harder part, to my mind, is making the whole thing more usable than the paper system it replaces - so there needs to be a focus on how to get documents in & out of the system, and on the applications that are crated to process the data. Not having a lot of experience with this sort of thinkg, I cannot really estimate how much work that is.
Vic.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
