NSW’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) is continuing to bed down a core matter and case management platform that it rebuilt on Appian.
NSW ODPP’s IT director Brendan Oldham (right).
Its 1000 staff had previously used a bespoke on-premises system that had been augmented over many years, albeit “with no real strategic intent”, IT director Brendan Oldham told an Appian summit.
“It was the only core system that the organisation had,” he said.
“This was the heart of our organisation, basically managing all of the matters coming in from police and through to the court system. It did everything.”
In deciding to modernise it, options were limited and no out-of-the-box solutions were suitable.
“We had to try and build something from scratch to a large extent,” Oldham said.
The chosen strategy was to replicate existing functionality – and 20 years’ worth of data – in a new system built on Appian, a low-code development platform.
“We figured the easiest way to try and get this going was to effectively copy the functionality
of the [existing] system to minimise change management,” Oldham said.
The system needed to be fully functional from day one; due to its critical role in prosecutions, the office determined that it could not have the old and new systems running side-by-side in a transition period.
“It had to be a ‘light switch’ transition,” Oldham said. “We had to turn off the old system on Thursday night, and Monday morning, turn on a new system for 800 solicitors and prosecutors across the place who needed to be in court on Monday morning.”
The cutover wound up being a day later, on a Tuesday morning a year ago.
“We didn’t quite make the Monday morning turn-off [target],” Oldham said.
“We’d loaded in 20 years’ worth of data into the system the weekend before and hadn’t really been able to fully load test the system despite all our good intentions of trying to run all the simulators and things like that across it.”
While noting it was “touch and go” for a few hours, Oldham said, “The good thing is we turned it on, and then didn’t have to turn it off.”
The amount of data was necessary because the system is a central record of people, charges and cases.
Oldham noted that it had to retain information because some cases stretched over many years. In addition, it needed to be able to handle appeals or be able to recall information from past prosecutions in other matters that may come before the courts.
Since switching over to the new platform, Oldham said that staff had begun to challenge some of the existing ways of working.
“They’re trying to think more creatively about doing things differently,” Oldham said, though he added that the office is subject to “very strict processes driven by legislation” and so doesn’t “have a lot of flexibility” with process transformation.
“We’ve done some minor improvements, but we’re still kind of just bedding down the system.”
Still, where it is able to make enhancements or introduce new features, it can move a lot faster.
“Previously, we couldn’t really move forward. Any change that we needed to do in the system would take us four-to-six months to develop and another probably six or so weeks to actually fix all the defects that were introduced from the changes, so it was a very painful exercise,” Oldham said.
That ability to move faster is beneficial in the face of rapid changes to legislation, which may need to be reflected in the office’s practices and systems.
It also meant the office could keep pace with increased mobility and digital information systems being seen in Australian courtrooms.
Future enhancements could see briefs of evidence – currently very paper-based – being digitised and incorporated into the system.
Oldham said that the office had also used Appian as the basis to redevelop a task management solution used by its HR and finance teams in five weeks, after the existing system needed replacing.
More such projects and use cases for the Appian platform were likely to emerge.
“Historically, [our ability to do that] has been very low, but now having a platform that we can actually build on [means] there’s now a list of new applications coming in the pipeline that everybody wants [us to build].”
The office is calling upon development resources from Appian partner Connexia as it builds out more functionality based on the vendor’s technology.