CITOC Innovation Award Winner – Barbara Holmes

At the Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC) Annual Meeting held in December 2012 in Las Vegas, the first Innovation Award winner was announced.

---

Last year CITOC announced the creation of their first Innovation Awards “to recognize notable contributions to the judiciary in Technology and Court Business Processes.”   A competition was held and the winner is:

Ms. Barbara Holmes, Enterprise Applications Design Architect at the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC).

From left to right: Robert Roth, Barbara Holmes, & Craig Burlingame 

She was recognized for her implementation of their Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and MS SQL Server Reporting Services projects.

The submission notes that the AOPC implemented the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application for rapid development of internal projects.  Using the person-based/role design approach of the CRM, the AOPC staff was able to envision and reuse the objects within the solution and re-think the logic behind the activities and use them to satisfy the needs of the AOPC Interpreter Certification and the AOPC’s Legal Staff offices.  Both of these internal offices need to track individuals or cases involving people.  And the AOPC decided to work the substance of the CRM application in ways to accommodate the business processes of the two offices.

Further, using Microsoft’s SharePoint and MS SQL Server Reporting Services (both integrated with the CRM application), AOPC analysts created custom entities with built-in document management, activity management and complex reporting and analytics to accommodate automation or facilitation of internal processes for these offices.

AOPC staff was also able to build dashboards (example below), displaying actions and notifications that are grouped by the team structure. Notifications are broadcast by distribution lists and by team.  And, dashboards were customized by the type of actions that the teams perform.  In addition, data grids can be accessed from the Site Map to open a full screen of the grid/form instead of accessing it through the Contact screen.

Pennsylvania Interpreter Staff Dashboard example
(click on the picture to enlarge)

Overall benefits to the court system:

• Ability to develop and facilitate implementation of plug-ins and custom code development
• The CRM allows for hosting of multiple solutions within a single framework, also allowing for code reuse
• MS CRM provides an extensive Knowledge Base for CRM, and users can most often find answers to their questions online.

Lastly, the project benefited the organization by providing core functionality to expand the workflow and electronic records management for court agencies, while minimizing the need for professional coders or long development time and expense.  Re-engineering of the role-based paradigm solution enabled rapid development, using non-technical staff, which thereby favorably impacted the courts’ and AOPC’s “bottom line.”

This and more are detailed in the CITOC submission click here.

Congratulations Barbara!