The legal department of the Government of Saskatchewan protects citizens over a vast territory with limited resources; it deals with more than 840,000 appearances in 13 permanent locations and 66 circuit locations each year. The legal department system had to contend with four disjointed data systems — one each for the adult and youth divisions of corrections with separate systems for the courts which held sentence, fine and restitution information — that were more than 30 years old. This caused extra staff effort, often leading to manual errors and high maintenance costs.
What the department needed was “an information repository of high-quality accused/offender data that provides stakeholders with a ‘single source of truth’ and ‘improved analysis and reporting capabilities.’”
They approached Dell to help them.
Reducing complexity with integration and consolidation
Dell stepped in with application re-architecture services to consolidate legacy applications
and interfaces, streamline procedures, helping the legal department reduce and eliminate the duplication of data entry and potential for errors, and decreases total data volume and more importantly modernize their system. Dell also implemented Data Modernization Workbench technology to help them overcome their challenges. The workbench technology is a patented tool that enables frequent data design and migration throughout the project. This delivers deep transformation and refactoring by enabling an incremental transformation design process.
Dell created a common application platform and database, the Integrated Justice Information Management System (IJIMS) — combined four legacy applications with 17 interfaces into a common application platform and database — which now “tracks the transition of an individual from the courts to a correction facility and from a youth to an adult subject.” The IJIMS has streamlined processes with respective agencies simplified processes and eliminated data re-entry.
Don Anderson, portfolio manager for Saskatchewan Integrated Justice hopes that “with the development of the central data model and elimination of duplicate data, the future will see an expanded integration to include many other related social services applications,” like Education, Health, Social Service. and Justice/Police. Because “crime is not just a criminal justice problem…it can also reflect problems associated with mental health, substance abuse, education or other issues” collaboration between agencies is vital, according to Dale McFee, Deputy Minister of Corrections and Policing. He adds, “Partnerships work best when silos are removed and information flows quickly, reliably and easily between everyone involved.”
The IJIMS application also fosters productivity, like enabling “corrections youth staff to concentrate on more valuable tasks like counseling.”
Today, not only is the legal department of the Govt. of Saskatchewan better positioned to work in a more integrated way with other government departments, Anderson says, “The real ‘secret sauce’ in making modernized application transformations work is uncovering duplicate data with a fairly straightforward process to create an ideal enterprise data model for the future ….” Click here to read the full case study.
Application re-architecture helps companies prepare for the future
Application re-architecture helps companies create an agile environments that offers customers a competitive edge, because it simplifies code, thereby reducing complexity and cost; it consolidates siloed systems, reducing complexities, and ensuring time and effort are optimized, by fostering collaboration between business units, and it gives them the ability to adopt newer technologies like cloud, virtualization and mobility, which in turn helps companies gain agility and grow. Find out more.