Swifter justice

With the goal of cutting processing time in half, the City of Mobile, AL is deploying a collaborative court case management system.

The Web-based application, based on FileNet's Brightspire e-business framework, will streamline the business process flow of court dockets through the judicial system and interact with different police agencies, as well as county, state and national crime databases, according to a press release from FileNet. It also gathers data from numerous host systems at the state, county and federal levels.

Says Sue Farni, Mobile's IT director, "We plan to use this system to access a variety of data sources--from arrest warrants, to drivers' histories, to pending case information. By ensuring that we can access the right data at the right time, we anticipate being able to cut our court case processing time in half. In addition, the technology will allow us to know quickly if a suspect has a criminal record or a warrant for arrest so we can get the most serious offenders off the street as soon as possible."

The Municipal Court's primary function is to prosecute breaches of ordinances and violations of state law including traffic, parking, code and city ordinance violations, as well as domestic and criminal violations. Currently, Mobile relies on a primarily manual process that requires numerous data entry steps within several applications. The new application is said to be designed to reduce the risk of lost documents and data by centralizing organization and processing, and allowing multiple organizations to share the information.

According to Farni, the application makes it easy to aggregate different data types, and the city's business analysts can modify the system without relying on the IT staff. Farni adds that the city plans to use the application to enhance communication with constituents by providing access to certain types of information online, such as upcoming court dates and the status of pending actions.

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