Letters to the AOC: What exactly is in that trojan horse you pushed out on an unsuspecting public?

Posted on February 26, 2011

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From: Michael Paul [mailto:michael_paul@michaelpaul.net]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 11:52 AM
To: ‘phillip.carrizoza@jud.ca.gov’; ‘pubinfo@jud.ca.gov’
Cc: ‘judicialcouncilwatcher@hushmail.com’
Subject: About the CCMS Cost Benefit Analysis…

Hello Mr. Carrizoza,

  

I’m writing to you today about the CCMS Cost Benefits Analysis. As a taxpayer, a business owner and a former senior technical analyst for the AOC, I’m concerned about the validity of the cost benefits analysis provided by the consulting firm Grant Thornton. Since I’m probably one of the few people qualified to speak to these matters outside of the AOC who used to work for the AOC, I’m taking that opportunity and intend to share what I learn. The reason I did not question these things before as an AOC employee is that I worked for Information Services and knew there was no surer way to end my employment than to openly ask questions such as these.

While this is not questioning the company as I believe the company is only doing what the AOC is paying them to do, much of the underlying data, such as survey questions and answers, licensing facts and figures from individual courts, estimates of migration costs per court, estimates of what API development will be required by local justice partners and all of the individual answers and underlying data provided by the AOC is missing from the cost benefits analysis. This is at best a summary that cannot be validated. Might you be able to provide the underlying data provided to Grant Thornton utilized to compile this cost benefits analysis? Might you make this information public or provide me with it directly?

 

Other questions.

 

This analysis and other documents provided by the AOC speak to a centralized document management model being located at the CCTC.

 

Question 1. : Won’t this require, in some cases a near complete redesign of some courts network architecture to accommodate the bandwidth requirements of scanning a document into a centralized document management system?  

 

Question 2 : Won’t this require, in all cases where you’re dependent on document management system centrally located, significant upgrades to the telecommunications lines between individual court facilities and the CCTC?

 

Question 3. : Doesn’t all of this come at the significant cost of the local trial courts? What are those estimated monthly cost increases for individual courthouses?

 

The next questions are related to Sacramento Courts and the issues they claim they are having.

 

Question 4 : In the past year, what corrective actions have been taken and at what cost, to improve the Sacramento Courts CCMS performance issues?

 

Question 5. : Where does the AOC and Sacramento trial courts currently stand with respect to CCMS as public statements from the courts lead me to believe there has been no improvement.What are the list of next steps and how much will they cost?

 

 

The citizens of the State of California thank you in advance for your transparency,

 

Michael Paul

Posted in: Administrative Office of the Courts, AOC, Branch Boondoggles, Information Services, Judicial Council of California