Municipality of Anchorage Prosecutor's Office
Anchorage, Alaska
"JustWare is an awesome product. We have no complaints, even from our IT department. We still have a lot of fine tuning to do, but the support has been awesome. We lucked out by choosing the correct vendor."
Karen Clark
Office Manager
November 7, 2008
Overview
The Municipality of Anchorage Prosecutor’s Office is located in beautiful south central Alaska. The agency handles a variety of misdemeanor cases including DUIs, domestic violence, theft, assault, and vehicle tampering. Until 2001, prosecutors struggled with an outdated and inflexible case management system. They needed a solution that could report statistics accurately and eventually integrate with justice community stakeholders. After a lengthy search process, the agency selected JustWare | Prosecutor as their case management solution and became the first agency in Alaska to adopt JustWare.
Challenge
The Municipality of Anchorage Prosecutor’s Office (MAPO) used an in-house developed IDMS and ADS/O based application on an IBM mainframe. The system assisted in case management, but the text-only inputs were inadequate for accurate statistical reports. MAPO needed a system that could handle reporting, increase functionality, and also generate cost savings through IDMS licensing. In early 2001, the agency sought to upgrade their previous system, but they found that the application was limited in flexibility and difficult to modify or enhance. The decision was finally made to acquire a new case management solution, and after several project setbacks the RFP was officially released in January of 2006.
Solution
The Anchorage prosecutors received responses to their RFP from several vendors. After exploring these options, Anchorage officials chose JustWare | Prosecutor, developed by New Dawn Technologies, as their case management solution with additional supplemental products, JusticeWebview and JusticeBroker. “JustWare was a clear winner,” recalled Karen Clark, Office Manager for MAPO. “It met all the RFP criteria and then some.” Once the selection process was complete, a New Dawn Project Management team was assigned to customize JustWare to the agency’s needs and to implement the system.
The New Dawn Project Management team also set out to convert all of MAPO’s information from their previous system into JustWare, but the variety of data caused by the text-only nature of the old application created a unique situation for the data conversion. Since JustWare utilizes drop down menus with customized fields and workflow, the Project Management team had to figure out which fields to place the mismatched data in. “It was a lot of work to figure out where to put the data,” said Clark of the conversion process, “but [our New Dawn Project Managers] did an awesome job figuring out where to put everything. Our experience with the conversion was fantastic.”
With all customizations and data conversions complete, Anchorage prosecutors were ready to launch their new case management solution; the agency went live with JustWare | Prosecutor in January 2008.
Result
The JustWare implementation gave MAPO the tools for more efficient data entry. Instead of using free text fields, the dropdown menus of JustWare streamlined data entry, drastically reduced data entry errors, and provided more accurate statistical reporting. Anchorage prosecutors use the document automation capabilities of JustWare to quickly generate pertinent case documents. In addition to the data integration, New Dawn Project Managers tailored the business rules and layout of JustWare to match the Anchorage prosecutors’ workflow.
Work still continues with New Dawn support staff to utilize JustWare to its full capacity and craft the solution to meet the needs of the Anchorage prosecutors. “[JustWare] is an awesome product,” said Clark, “We have no complaints, even from our IT department. We still have a lot of fine tuning to do, but the support has been awesome. We lucked out by choosing the correct vendor.”
Ongoing Goals
Anchorage prosecutors are also currently working to allow other agencies access to information in JustWare. According to Clark, the future plan is to integrate JustWare with the Anchorage Police Department’s records management system and with the Anchorage court system’s database. MAPO purchased JusticeBroker, New Dawn’s data exchange platform, with this integration plan in mind. MAPO also purchased JusticeWebview, which will allow outside agencies to have secured access to important case information, reports, and statistics through permissions defined by the system administrators at the prosecutor’s office. As of October 2008, JusticeWebview is available to MAPO stakeholders.
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