Creating a joined-up agenda for the criminal justice system

A key element of the role of the director general of Criminal Justice IT (CJIT) is communication.

The job involves liaising with several independent agencies, each with a variety of separate projects.

John Suffolk, formerly managing director of Britannia Building Society, took over the role in February and now spends 50 per cent of his time 'wandering around making sure people know what the right hand, left hand, right leg and left leg are doing,' he says.

'We are dealing with seven different agencies, 400,000-plus people and 43 independent police forces, all with their own agendas, issues and business priorities,' Suffolk told Computing.

'With any programme of this nature the priority is to make the joined-up agenda consistent in people's minds, and therefore on their agendas, and keep the various change projects in alignment.'

Technology-enabled change is never easy. But at least a single business has only itself to consider, says Suffolk.

With multiple independent parties, all pursuing their own plans, a seemingly innocuous decision taken on one project can cause delays somewhere else.

'That decision can end up costing hundreds of millions of pounds, when you add the cost of the delay itself and the delay in benefits, and my primary role is keeping that uppermost in people's minds,' said Suffolk.

'The joined-up agenda is not necessarily everyone's top priority every day and I have to work within that framework.'

Most major change programmes are formed by deciding what systems are needed to achieve a given business objective - but multiple initiatives were already underway when CJIT was formed. The case and custody systems developed for the police were in the process of being rolled out, as was the Libra courts project and the Crown Prosecution Service's Compass case management system. CJIT was formed to pull all these together into an over-arching, joined-up agenda.

A key milestone in the programme's progress so far was the implementation of secure email across the whole criminal justice system.

'People think that's easy but because of the type of information the agencies use it needs the highest level of resilience, security and so on, with all the relevant policies and procedures,' said Suffolk.

'For the first time we went out to the regions and got the agencies to work together.'

The next major step forward is the launch of Exchange, the system that will begin to automatically populate information from one agency's system to another's. The first version of the system will go live at the end of the year.

'If you accept that each agency has its own systems, architectures, business objectives and so on, then the ability to start from a blank sheet and come up with a single new environment is non-existent,' said Suffolk.

'So the question is how you get information from A to B when the format is different? That is what Exchange does. As information flows through, it captures the data so we can then build portals and applications on top. It is where the joined-up agenda really kicks in,' he said.

As is often the case with major government projects, the technology itself is not particularly complex. For CJIT the major challenges are the logistics of co-ordinating different agencies, and the scale of managing that at a national level.

One agency's national roll out will be following one sequence, and another agency's another. The test for CJIT is trying to align the different implementation plans so local criminal justice boards across the country are only affected once.

'It can be difficult because there are often dependencies in the programme that force the roll out in a given sequence - the type of technology or type of migration for example - and the challenge is getting people to step back from the passion of delivering their own system to see the larger joined-up agenda,' said Suffolk.

'Dealing with that can be some carrot and stick, some bloody-mindedness and some hard logic.'

It is important to be realistic with a programme of this size, says Suffolk.

'I can predict that some things will go forward or back a month,' he said.

'We therefore have to build environments that cater for the fact that something happening in one project goes through to another, but if that is not ready the system doesn't fall down. So a key milestone is to begin to align and co-terminate multiple national roll outs and connect all the systems up.'

Realising the benefits is also more complex because the stakeholders span three separate Whitehall departments.

'In some cases these are things no one has done before and we are doing some very sophisticated modeling to see how they work. There are tons of benefits even at the simplest level, but the issue is how to articulate them when benefits are popping up in other people's budgets because they are recipients of the change rather than providers,' said Suffolk.

On top of ensuring adequate communication between agencies, and spotting opportunities for joining up, a key element of the director general's job is getting people to make decisions.

In a programme with so many stakeholders, there is a danger decisions are put off forever, says Suffolk.

'It is always a concern that a decision will blow up in your face but it is still better to make a decision than not at all,' he said.

'You can't second guess every issue throughout the life of the programme so the issue is about making sure the tools and techniques are all in place so when we come across a surprise we can address it rapidly. My job is to drive people to the finishing line and the only way to do that is to get people to make decisions.'

Suffolk is in the process of creating an installation where participants can literally walk through the criminal justice process so they can understand what people in other parts of the system really do.

'Until you can turn something nebulous into something tangible you don't really get breakthrough thinking,' he said.

'I'm trying to get round the question of how you get to know what someone else does to the point where you can reflect on what your own new business requirements are. That is a real challenge and it's why change tends to be incremental and slow.'

Joined-up Justice

• The criminal justice system (CJS) is made up of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, magistrates' courts, crown courts, prisons, probation, and youth offending teams
  
• The long-term plan is for all parts of the system to be on a secure network with free-flow of information
  
• Plans for a single central case management system have been superceded by a 'virtual' system where information held in individual agencies' systems are available to all appropriate personnel
  
• Criminal Justice IT has a three-year budget of £1.2bn
  
• Work so far has focused on putting in the necessary infrastructure across all the agencies and implementing a CJS-wide secure email system
  
• The first version of the Exchange system for automatically sharing information between agencies' systems is due to go live at the end of the year