Michigan Statewide Judicial Data Warehouse

 SUMMARY

Judicial Data Warehouse Project Presentation

The Michigan Judicial Data Warehouse (JDW) is a central data repository that brings Michigan Courts into the 21st century with information technology resulting in better decision making, quicker turnaround time, and the ability to easily exchange data with courts and agencies to serve and protect Michigan citizens.

The reason for the establishment of the JDW is for the Michigan Supreme Court, State Court Administrative Office (SCAO) to provide one consolidated database to the judicial community. The JDW utilizes a “unique person identifier” to tie together data and provide a complete report of all known data about any individual’s involvement with the courts.

The development of the JDW is a joint effort between the SCAO, the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT), and Bull Services. The project roles are:

• SCAO is the project sponsor, and provides policy direction and oversight.
• MDIT administers the State’s Enterprise Data Warehouse.
• Bull Services provides the project resource specialists for managing and maintaining the system deployment, infrastructure, programming, and end-user support.

Sponsored and driven by the SCAO, working in partnership with Bull Services, the project combines, standardizes, and links data from the Judiciary’s 241 trial court locations – Circuit, District, and Probate.

BENEFITS

The JDW provides several benefits to Michigan Trial Courts and state agencies including:

Access to consistent data within one, statewide database with standardized court data to identify cases that an adult or juvenile has had with the Michigan Courts since 1970.

• Judges, clerks, and administrators are able to track any single activity an individual has had within any court in the state through a Statewide Name Search capability utilizing Bull Services’ Unique Person Identifier (UPI).
• Criminal court judges have faster, better access to statewide court information at their fingertips, from arraignment to case closing.
• Civil court proceedings proceed more rapidly due to accurate, automated information about participants and actions in such cases. Judges and clerks access data through personal computers, rather than relying on paperwork from disparate sources.
• Courts provide rapid response to queries from the Legislature and the Administration Office.

Complete picture of an individual’s history with the Michigan Judicial system, and assists with locating individuals for collection purposes and making better informed sentencing decisions.

• Court officials make “apples to apples” comparisons of meaningful data – caseloads, types of offenses, demographics, and other criteria to conduct sophisticated, in-depth analyses to make policy and planning decisions .
• Michigan’s Courts may predict the impact of changes to laws and policies by using the data warehouse to create data models and make projections.
• Michigan Dept of Corrections personnel generate pre-sentencing reports using the data in the JDW that has proven to save time by gathering the necessary information from one, statewide resource.

Interfaces with external state agencies such as the Michigan Department of Community Health, Department of State and Department of Corrections, as a result of SCAO data sharing agreements to exchange data for the benefit of the Courts.

User-friendly applications to search and query court data.

• The JDW Name Search Application is an inquiry only, web-based portal application that provides a single point of access to current and historical judicial data from Michigan courts. It is the most popular and easiest application to use for court personnel to view data on any person that is involved in Michigan’s various trial court systems. The application has a key set of parameters and processes for standardizing statewide data and uniquely identifies individuals known to the Michigan court system.
• The JDW BI Query Application is a reporting tool that can be used to develop detailed or aggregate reports using both the court and the agency data available in the JDW. This more advanced data reporting tool helps answer questions such as, determining how many cases are open and closed for judges in a particular court for a specific timeframe, or researching what the most frequently occurring offenses are in a particular county.

LOOKING AHEAD

The Statewide Judicial Data Warehouse (JDW) is a government-funded project that is charged with combining data from Michigan’s 35 different case management systems executing on 150 different platforms for the purpose of sharing information among courts and other state agencies. As of April 2008, seventy-eight percent of Michigan courts have been implemented (189 courts out of 241) and 28.3 + million court cases are currently shared in the JDW.

The JDW provides a secure communication network for data being pushed by connected systems into the central repository, where data standardization processes occur. Then, a copy of the full database from each court is sent via FTP and uploaded into the JDW. The individual courts submit data at different times which ranges from monthly to weekly.

Strong security and privacy safeguards are an integral part of the JDW. The system is only accessible through the State of Michigan’s secure network. The general public does not have access to the system. Access to the JDW is only available to court personnel, or any state personnel approved by the SCAO.

By the end of 2008, the remaining twenty-two percent of Michigan trial courts will be on the JDW, making it the comprehensive source of information required by the Technical Advisory Group.