Touching the void

• Article 69 of 77
• Information Age, July 2004

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"We constructed a PFI [Public Finance Initiative] deal with Logica in January 2002," says Clair Hamon, director of business information systems at CPS. "One of the core goals was to provide a case management system for the whole CPS." Each year, CPS has to deal with 1.5 million cases, all of which were processed using a paper-based system. Unfortunately, says Hamon, that led to lost and misplaced files. Neither could the system warn lawyers when custody times of suspects were due to expire. The new case management system was designed both to mirror the paper system and augment it with additional capabilities.

With Logica developing the system, Hamon and her team interviewed 400 users across the community of lawyers, case workers and administration staff to see what their typical response to change, working culture and IT was. They then developed a programme of work around change management education.

Three months before demonstrations of the new system became available, Hamon's team went out and talked staff through what was likely to be coming and how it would affect their working practices. They also worked with local management to look at general levels of IT literacy among their staff. In conjunction with a third-party supplier, they developed an 'IT driving licence' which showed the least literate how to use desktop PCs, email and so on, so that when training was ready for the case management system, all the staff would be working from the same baseline.

"The system design team was drawn from the lawyer community and they worked with Logica to design the core business processes," explains Hamon.

Rollout of the system was completed at the tail end of 2003, with several system updates implemented since then.

"There was a variety of responses to the system," says Hamon. "The admin staff and the case workers found it much easier to transfer, as did people new to the organisation. The area where there was some reluctance was around the lawyers who argued they were lawyers not typists."

But, says Hamon, the benefits of the system to both the lawyers' working lives and to victims of crimes, who can now see how their cases are progressing online, have convinced the majority of its usefulness.

Case study: User acceptance: How not to do it

Simon Ball, commercial director of IT services and consulting company Salmon, is an evangelist for end-user involvement. Partly, he says, it was because of his own experiences as an end-user. A former salesman at a US-run multinational corporation, Ball was one of many caught up in a customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation system rollout that, while technologically successful, ended up unused by the majority of the company's employees.

"It didn't take into account cultural, even language differences in the rest of the world," recalls Ball. "Americans are used to one currency and one language: American. Head office was eight hours away in California and this was a massive rollout, yet there was no communication from the top end about why the company was doing it, the business imperatives and the benefits at all levels."

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