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| N.H. agency to revamp criminal offender systems |
| By Computer World |
| Published: 08/16/2004 |
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The New Hampshire Department of Corrections (DOC) hopes to retire a legacy criminal offender field management system with a long history of troubles as part of an effort to rectify shortcomings in the agency's IT infrastructure. The original system, designed to help with the case management of criminal offenders on probation or parole, was to have been built by Computer Associates International Inc. The custom application was also supposed to handle financial transactions, including the payment of fines to the state and restitution money to victims. But after working on the system for more than two years and spending $240,000, the state had little to show for its efforts, and the DOC and CA severed all ties in August 2002. As part of a negotiated settlement, CA refunded the money DOC had paid, according to Ron Cormier, a project manager at the agency. After that effort failed, in-house staffers tinkered with the existing parole and probation management system, creating a stripped-down version of the application to handle restitution and fine payments. By writing code around a "very old and outdated" fourth-generation Informix database, the DOC was able to put together a system that allows it to issue restitution checks to victims every 30 days -- down from the original 90-day processing cycle, Cormier said. While that system now handles restitution accounts adequately, it lacks the case management features the agency needed when it hired CA, said state Rep. David Welch, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee that has oversight of the DOC. "It's a basic system that doesn't fulfill our needs," he said. For instance, as envisioned, the system would have let police or field correction officers easily access the full records of probationers caught committing crimes. As a result, the DOC plans to retire its two Unix-based offender management systems and replace them with a single application running off a SQL Server database. The agency issued a request for proposals earlier this year and is now awaiting approval from the governor's office before moving forward with its plans. The DOC wants a Web-based system that will support the payment of fines, parole management and support for prison facilities and management processes associated with handling the Granite State's 2,500 inmates and 7,000 offenders who are on parole or probation. Cormier said the system will be written to Microsoft .Net programming specifications and will be able to share data, for instance, between prison facilities and field service officers. "When an offender comes into the system, his entire stay would be tracked through until he's on parole, including the financial processes," said Cormier. Although details about the upgrade are still confidential pending the governor's approval, the DOC hopes to launch the implementation this October and wrap up the project by April 2006. Although Cormier doesn't know how much it cost the state to create the restitution database now in place, he said the DOC has learned from its overall experience with the data warehouse project. "We wanted the initial system to be built from the ground up, and in the requirements phase of the project, [DOC officials] asked for a lot instead of ensuring they got minimal functionality and building onto that," said Cormier. Ultimately, he said, "we learned we needed to ask for a base system, then build off that." Because of the negotiated settlement between the DOC and CA, Cormier could offer few details now about why the project went awry. CA officials weren't available for comment. |
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