Nov 95 Level of Govt: State. Function: Court Management. Problem/situation: Utah needed to improve the performance and efficiency of its court system. Solution: Hard work, careful planning and a new case management system. Jurisdiction: Utah. Vendors/Products: Pentium, Wang, Hewlett-Packard, Informix, Oracle, Novell, PowerBuilder, Intel, Sybase, Contact: ?

By Bruce Gavin Contributing Writer Some folks may not believe that hard work and careful planning will get them into the winner's circle. But when the Utah state courts used these methods, they crossed the finish line way ahead of second place. In January 1992, the mandate came down for the courts to "do more with less." The data processing (DP) group began the task of reengineering the Courts' Case Management system. The main objectives were to improve the performance and efficiency of the system and reduce computational costs. In February 1992, just one month into the Case Management system overhaul, a new priority developed. The Utah state Legislature passed a bill that centralized the creation and maintenance of the juror selection list. The law shifted juror list responsibility from the individual counties to the Utah Courts' System. Due to miscommunication, the new requirement wasn't given to the DP group until April, two months later. The law required the juror processing system be in operation by July 1, 1992. This left only two short months to create and implement the new system.

Making it Happen To meet this critical deadline, MIS Director Rolen Yoshinaga brought in the heavy artillery. His development staff called upon PowerBuilder and its Rapid Application Development (RAD) technology to create the initial juror list databases. These interim files served as design models for the Informix database. When development was complete, the final Informix 5 database was constructed from voter registration and drivers license data. It runs on Hewlett-Packard 9000 series UNIX-based servers connected with a TCP/IP network. The entire database migration from PowerBuilder to Informix was completed in a week. "With the PowerBuilder application, we just switched the xBASE hooks for Informix hooks," Yoshinaga noted. "We configured our application to work in the new environment in one week. That's a process of changing our DBMS and network system that usually takes months. The PowerBuilder application came right up, never missing a beat." Yoshinaga expressed a high level of satisfaction with PowerBuilder. Combining a PowerBuilder client with the Informix server eliminates the "fat client" that requires a Pentium-class machine. Most of the processor-intensive work is done by the Informix back end. A modest 486 client is fully capable of handling the front end presentation chores with the database. Yoshinaga estimates 70 percent of the business rules reside in the Informix back end. The remaining 30 percent are in the PowerBuilder client. Because of its many enhancements, the DB group plans a direct migration from Informix 5 to release 7. Although Sybase and Oracle also bid on the project, Informix received the contract. When asked about the deciding factor, Yoshinaga summed it up in a single word: "service." He was very satisfied with the support he received from the Informix consultants.

Rewriting the Old After successfully meeting the July 1 deadline, the DP group turned its attention back to rewriting the case management system. The old system was a network of Wang minicomputers installed at 40 court locations throughout the state. The COBOL-based application processed every administrative aspect of both civil and criminal cases. The system maintained date scheduling, judge assignments, and records of court proceedings and sentences. Payment and fine collection histories were kept for every type of violation, from child support to parking tickets. The old case management system was very time-intensive. It required seven to eight minutes of clerical time to file each of the 400,000 cases handled every year. Another shortcoming was the inability to share data between the different counties. Each county was an island of information, known only to itself. A study called Justice in the Twenty First Century provided design suggestions