State Justice Institute
The Client
The State Justice Institute (SJI) was established by Federal law in 1984 to award grants to improve the quality of justice in State courts, facilitate better coordination between State and Federal courts, and foster innovative, efficient solutions to common issues faced by all courts.
SJI is unique both in its mission and how it seeks to fulfill it. Only SJI has the authority to assist all State courts - criminal, civil, juvenile, family, and appellate - and the mandate to share the success of one State’s innovations with every State court system as well as the Federal courts.
SJI carries out its mission in a variety of ways that maximize the impact of its funding, including:
- Placing practical products in the hands of the judges and court staff who can most benefit from them;
- Maintaining information clearinghouses to assure that effective new judicial approaches in one State are quickly and economically shared with other courts nationwide;
- Establishing national resource centers where judges and court staff obtain expert guidance, test new technologies, and learn from each other;
- Convening national, regional, and in-State educational programs to speed the transfer of solutions to issues shared by courts across the nation; and.
- Delivering national technical assistance targeted at specific jurisdictions’ specific problems.
The Challenge
SJI utilizes a legacy application called GEMS to track its corporate grants. The system has not been modernized since the late 1990’s. Moreover, SJI has experienced a significant reduction in workforce and their workflow process has evolved to reflect this reduction and other business factors. SJI engaged Segue to re-engineer GEMS. The newly re-engineered result will be renamed Grant Management System (GMS). GMS shall retain many of the capabilities from GEMS but differ in respect to an improved and modernized interface designed to reflect SJI’S current workflow, a re-designed performance-tuned database, and an updated hardware environment.
The Solution
GMS’ primary purpose is to provide a mechanism to gather application information and track that application through award determination. Moreover, GMS provides its user community with the capability to receive e-mail notification to remind them to send out requests to their grantee for quarterly Progress Reports and Financial Status Reports as well as 90-Day Closeout Letter.
Re-engineering, in its broadest sense, includes the following.
- Aligning the current system’s interface to reflect current workflow
- Modernizing the user interface by re-designing it to be more functional
- Redesigning the user interface to be more aesthetically agreeable
- Migrating the system’s legacy RDBMS from DB2 to SQL Server 2003.
- Retuning the RDBMS to provide a better (faster) user experience.