Committee approves cloud-based jury management upgrade tied to county's enterprise justice system

The County Operations Committee on July 29 approved a contracted upgrade of the county’s jury management system and heard an extensive briefing on the county's Enterprise Justice software suite.

County IT staff and court administrators described the enterprise system as a single, integrated criminal-and-civil case-management platform that serves the sheriff's office, courts, the circuit clerk, the public defender and the state's attorney. Staff said the original project began in 2011, went live in November 2013 and has since received ongoing upgrades; the system was migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting the month before the meeting.

Mr. Little, an IT staff presenter, summarized the system's scope: the county initially invested about $6.2 million to replace an aging mainframe; with subsequent maintenance and upgrades the total county spending on the platform approaches $11 million. He said the platform now runs roughly 53 backend servers and stores about 15 terabytes of documents. Little described multiple integrated modules — jail manager, attorney manager, case manager (formerly Odyssey), enterprise supervision for probation, public-facing case portals and integrations with vendor products such as Axon and commissary systems — all of which send or receive data from the central case manager.

Jennifer, from the jury office, outlined practical benefits of the new cloud-based jury system: digital check-in, automatic exam/questionnaire attachments from batch scanning, and automated email/text notifications for jurors. Jennifer said the older jury system has been in use for 17 years and “all of that would go away with this new system. It would be digital, and just eliminate a lot of risks with the paper.” She also described an instance the same day where paperwork delays had delayed a murder trial.

Committee members questioned the trade-offs of an integrated single-vendor system. Doctor Blair asked about disadvantages; Mr. Little noted vendor lock-in and potential pricing risk but said integration reduces staffing and integration overhead compared with multiple-vendor setups. Members also asked about possible intergovernmental agreements: the city of Peoria has requested a warrant-review feature ("CloudGav") and has offered cost sharing; staff said an intergovernmental agreement and demonstrations are pending and could come later this year.

The motion to place the jury upgrade resolution on the floor was made by Doctor Blair and seconded by Ms. Coats; the committee chair called the vote and recorded passage. Staff said the jury module will be procured as a cloud-based, three-year SaaS arrangement and will be integrated with the county's existing Enterprise Justice deployment.