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The Austrian Ministry of Justice is redesigning the application that manages all the data associated with court cases in the country of Austria.

Organization: Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice
Location: Austria
Industry: Government

Justice Served with Java
The original application, developed in 1986, is used at all levels of the Austrian justice system for the following types of court cases:

  • Proceedings of the probate court
  • Family cases
  • Civil proceedings
  • Enforcement of judgments
  • Bankruptcy proceedings
  • Prosecution
  • Appeal cases

The current system, built on DPPX/370, is currently used by over 6,000 court clerks and judges and processes more than 2.5 million cases annually.

IBM: The Technology Partner of Choice
After 10 years of use, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice concluded that the system--originally designed to support only special types of civil cases--could not cost-effectively be extended, and a complete redesign and rewrite was warranted. The Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice sought a development partner by means of an EU-wide RFP. IBM was chosen as the technology provider for its experience with application scalability and design complexity as well as detailed knowledge of the global Justice marketplace.

This effort will totally revamp the court system application from the ground up using state of the art technologies. Support for additional proceeding types, such as criminal proceedings at the high courts, will be included as will over 100 new requirements. It will provide an intuitive GUI, online help and documentation, and better integration of local text processing. The system will be used mainly in the court's intranet with some information available to the public via the internet--where there is a legal obligation to do so.

To ensure its extensibility and due to the heterogeneity of the systems throughout Austria, the system had to be as platform independent as possible. After evaluating several alternatives, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Justice chose Java as the logical choice to allow them to meet the key requirements of portability and reuse.

New Technologies
The new system will support all the capabilities of the old system as well as incorporate a host of extensive features. It will significantly increase electronic access to the pertinent data that various parties require for their court cases. It will also leverage the multimedia capability of the PCs that will provide the graphical user interface into the system.

In addition to dramatically increasing the productivity of the users, support for capturing and presenting digitized voice and images will be added, making the system even more suited to supporting the demands of the modern justice system. The new system is expected to totally transform the way IT systems are used in the courts in Austria, eventually allowing for the collection of evidence electronically and the monitoring of all court proceedings and outcomes.

It is expected that the new system will:

  • Handle higher case loads at the courts, while shortening the duration of court proceedings
  • Provide better responsiveness about the status of a case, by keeping most of the case data online
  • Improve the quality of information/documents sent to involved parties
  • Enable electronic communication in the legal field avoiding keying time at the courts
  • Provide the necessary statistics for personnel planning and auditing

The new application will be a three-tier application supporting approximately 7,500 clients running OS/2, more than 200 WARP Servers, which will run the business logic of the application, and a OS/390 data server running CICS and DB2. It is expected that the application will begin to be utilized in early 1999 and be in full production by January, 2001.



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