justice report
Digital justice: An opportunity Causeway Permanent Secretary of the Department of Justice, Peter May, discusses the ongoing digitalisation of justice, the impact of Covid-19 and the opportunities for advancement under the Digital Justice Strategy 2020–2025. May begins by emphasising the unique nature of the operating system within justice and pinpointing the operating environment as the greatest challenge of transformation within the sector. The highly complex system involves a range of different organisations, many of which are independent in terms of their decision-making. In IT terms, this means a range of operating systems and as May outlines, progress requires a collective will. “To be truly effective and for the system to be effective, all organisations have to work in close collaboration as the actions taken by one partner impacts on another. Users of the system,
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including victims, witnesses and those accused, experience justice as one continuum and not a series of separate experiences, so we need a system that recognises the independence but also the inter-dependence of all partners if it is to work.” The challenges of agencies’ inter-dependence in relation to digital, is aided by a mature datasharing hub in the form of Causeway. The Causeway system at the heart of the criminal justice has evolved from its original case management format in the noughties to one which enables enhanced management information capabilities and sharing between five major criminal justice agencies.
