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Utah Courts Construct Data Warehouse
After the Internet, data warehousing is the hottest trend in the computing industry. Ninety-six percent of Fortune 2000 companies will have a data warehouse on-line in 1998. Most of these organizations are trying to improve access to data and manage the avalanche of data available today. The state courts in Utah are coming up with a solution that will drastically enhance the tracking of and response to caseload trends, the facilitation of forecasting and planning efforts, and the supply of overall strategic information. This article will explain fundamental data warehouse concepts, explore the benefits of a data warehouse, and provide a glimpse at where the technology is going.
The data warehouse is a new solution to an old problem, a problem that worsens as the volume and complexity of data that organizations must manage increase exponentially. The data glut of which I speak is the result of the shift by courts to database technology that began during the 1980s and continues with the move to client/server technology. The data warehouse is an attempt to make this hard-to-get-at operational data accessible for decision support in a format with which users are familiar and comfortable.
In Utah, a new client/server case management system exists for all state general jurisdiction courts, which collect much more information than ever before. At the same time, there are separate case management systems for the appellate, juvenile, and justice courts. Not surprisingly, we are experiencing data overload. The quandary is that unless you are a skilled data processing professional, retrieving the data is difficult, and even if the right data is available, analysis is difficult, given the present desktop tools. In addition, regardless of who collects the data, it is neither timely nor as accurate as desired. As State Court Administrator Daniel J. Becker notes, "We are data rich, but information poor."
Let me illustrate with a common scenario. A court manager walks into the office and questions whether case filings in her district are down over the last six months. Before the data warehouse, I would dismiss her, promising to have the results of my many queries next week. Instead, I ask her to hover over my computer so we can analyze the situation.
I first display a map of the state on my computer. I then click on her judicial district and type in a date range, at which point case filings are displayed by county. I point to a percent sign, and the percentage change from this year to last appears. We quickly notice that filings in only one county are down, so I click on the county name and a list of court locations is displayed. We surmise that filings are down in only one court location in the county, so I switch gears by clicking on my case icon to view total filings separated into major case categories. Looking further, we realize that traffic filings are responsible for the total decline in new filings. I click on another button, and traffic filings are portrayed in a line graph for the past 12 months, allowing the court manager to analyze trends. Lastly, without leaving the application, we post the graph to the intranet for other judges in the district to see and send an e-mail to the presiding judge explaining the decline.
The court manager likes what she sees, but I have created another problem. You see, she lives with the same information glut I do and now she must learn to manage even more data. But I've saved the best for last. I explain that the warehouse software provides for the delivery of information to an individual desktop automatically, based on exceptions set by an end user.
Let's say the presiding judge in this same court wants to be notified when the court's caseload drops below local time standards. I simply set an exception and alert, notifying the application to send a report via e-mail to the judge if the time to disposition for a given case type is outside an acceptable range. The judge can then export the report to a desktop application, add comments, and e-mail the end product to judges and administrators in the district.
How Does It Work?
You can't buy a data warehouse; you have to build it. Client/server architecture, graphical user interfaces, relational and multidimensional data analysis tools, and data modeling software are used to consolidate courtwide operational data into a separately designed relational database. The process of data warehousing, not to be confused with the physical database called the data warehouse, is summarized in five steps.
The first step is capturing data at multiple court locations using standard case management software. Programs that collect this production data are on-line transaction processing systems (OLTP), optimized for gathering data one case at a time. The difficulty for the information analyst is that access to the data generated by an OLTP system is often difficult. Because case management systems are designed to process and track individual cases, not deliver strategic management information, it is difficult to get a complete picture of a court's workload.
The second step, cleansing the data, is where data warehousing really begins. Because data is drawn from multiple sources, discrepancies in semantics must be reconciled. For example, if different source databases contain the records Judge E. Smith, Jdge. Ellen Smith, and J. Ellen and they represent the same individual, data scrubbing is necessary to make the names consistent.
Third, the data coming from these multiple sources (appellate, juvenile, and district courts) are combined in a single database, optimized for end user queries. The content of this database is presented in a subject-oriented format that is easy for end users to access and analyze from a historical perspective. The contents of the database include:
- Facts--the numbers in the warehouse (for example, amount of revenue collected, number of cases filed, and amount of fees assessed). This data comes from the case management systems.
- Characteristics or dimensions--the descriptors or attributes putting the numbers in context (for example, divorce case type, Third District Court, fiscal year 1998).
Separating the contents of the warehouse in this manner allows information to be organized in a way that facilitates user interaction. This approach is necessary because users talk about the data they need in business terms rather than technical jargon. Judges and administrators often can't specify their information need but are much better at articulating the decisions they make and the level of data required to answer their question. Typically, users get an answer to one question and then come up with another, which has not even been contemplated. You construct the data warehouse to allow "what if" analysis so that the questions asked do not have to be fully defined.
Finally, graphical query tools attach to the warehouse. Information is delivered either through a "smart" desktop application or through a Web browser connected to the intranet. The Web allows us to distribute information to places that we didn't think possible and to make it live, on-line, and dynamic. For instance, our legislative fiscal analyst directly accesses data that he previously had to request from research staff. Now he can use his Web browser to get court information as easily as he can access any information from the Web, with control, security, and structure. Eventually, controlled access may be given to anyone who wants to do ad hoc querying of the court database via the Internet.
The Future
The potential for this technology is far-reaching. Even more ambitious is a future interdepartmental data warehouse that stocks information from all justice agencies in the state to present a complete, unified picture of any given criminal offender. Information in which there is a shared interest will be culled from these data marts and stored in a database accessible by all interested parties.
Further, we are expanding our current definition of information. One need only look at the dramatic effect the World Wide Web is having on society to understand that the storage and retrieval of traditional data types--numbers, dollars, text--will no longer suffice. The vision is to use innovative database technology to supplement the storage of simple numbers with the storage of complex data--electronically filed documents, images, voice, and video. This makes all of the information about a court case, from the pleading initiating the matter to the video recording made at trial, accessible from a personal computer and available in a searchable format.
Eric Leeson is the director of Information Services for the Utah State Courts. He can be reached at (801) 578-3831 or by e-mail at ericl@email.utcourts.gov
