The criminal justice system needs simpler technology. IT consultants may now understand this, but does Whitehall? Rupert White reports


Last week saw the Criminal Justice Management conference take place in London, at which Ministry of Justice minister David Hanson and Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair, among others, spoke. But one speaker who went unreported revealed more about the reality of criminal justice IT and its management.



That person was not Sir Ron de Witt, chief executive of the Courts Service. Sir Ron told the audience how much had improved in the courts since he arrived there four years ago, citing Money Claims Online and Possession Claims Online as key wins for the service.



When he started, he recalled, it had been necessary to put electricity into some courts before anything more complex could be done, such was the state of infrastructure. He had recently been to another country, he said, which he would not name, where he had seen a really joined-up justice system. That had taken just seven years to achieve, he said.



Sir Ron then said how much of a success criminal justice secure email had been in joining up agencies and in sharing information. He said the infamous LIBRA system for magistrates' courts information management will be finished by the end of 2008. He concluded by saying that the recent Virtual Courts programme, on which Whitehall has yet to report, has been a success.



But secure email has been a failure in terms of uptake with solicitors and barristers. Systems for sharing information throughout the criminal justice system, such as the National Offender Management IT system, have ground to a halt. LIBRA is a joke among IT professionals. One LogicaCMG source the Gazette spoke to after the speech agreed that the likelihood of it being ready next year - it does not transfer to its new project owners LogicaCMG and Atos Origin until then - was close to zero.



Sir Ron's speech seemed even more fanciful because it came after one by Matt Howell, head of UK public sector technology services for consultants CapGemini. Mr Howell laid out some of the things that are going wrong in criminal justice IT (CJIT) in simple terms, and admitted, for the IT industry as a whole, some responsibility.



He asked: can a police officer access information and know it is complete, and complete across the whole criminal justice system (CJS)? Can information about offenders be passed around seamlessly within the CJS? 'I'd hazard that the answers to those questions are probably no,' he said. And one of the reasons for that is that 'the IT, the systems that [IT vendors] have delivered to you, could be substantially improved', he said.



'The core processes within the [CJS] are not supported adequately or indeed flexibly,' he said. A big problem is the IT that the justice system has already been sold, and the CJS's inherent complexity, he added.



This has been made worse by poor delivery. 'It's our experience that there is a lack of confidence in IT delivery within the justice system as a whole,' he said. 'There's a lack of understanding as to what the [CJS] business needs and how to translate that into requirements [within the CJS itself and] I think there isn't as much collaboration across criminal justice organisations to share IT, to share IT services and to share data as there should be.



'And it's fair to say that our track record of delivery of IT systems that work on time to you is probably not as good as it has been in other industries, for example the financial services industry,' he said. 'And if we accept that broadly the same suppliers provide that IT, that's something we need to step up to the mark about.'



The solution was now in following what the CJS wants to do without building huge applications for it. This may well work partly because, as he pointed out, systems out there work better with each other now. But it is vital because building fewer enormous IT systems should have a disproportionately large effect on reducing costs - probably 80% of government IT spend goes on infrastructure and existing systems, explained Mr Howell.



For its part, the IT industry needs to acknowledge that it must help the CJS in other ways than it has, in other words. 'We need to invest more time to deeply understand your business, not just looking to build another application,' said Mr Howell, 'because I would argue that the last thing the justice needs right now is another great big application.'



Mr Howell pointed to the Virtual Courts test, run in London this year, as being a great success and relatively inexpensive. 'What we have done is to use simple collaborative tools to share documents, simple tools like video conferencing. It's user-led, it's agile, it only took 13 weeks, and users love it. That's what's important.'



The Gazette understands that the Virtual Courts programme has not had many cases run through it, so how great a success it is remains to be seen. But at least the IT industry is owning up to not delivering, and may be trying to address this. The criminal justice organisations need to do the same.