Bringing ERP to California's trial courts.

• Author: Hayden, Melanie
• Position: Order in the Courts! - Enterprise resource planning supports Court Accounting and Reporting System

Until recently, the State of California's trial courts were the responsibility of county governments throughout the state. Most of California's 58 counties were providing day-to-day administrative services and financial systems for the trial courts. However, with the passage of California Assembly Bill 233, the responsibility for funding and financial oversight of the courts shifted to the California Judicial Council. The administrative arm of the Judicial Council, the Administrative Office of the Courts, or AOC, is responsible for implementing several initiatives to promote fiscal accountability among the trial courts. One of these initiatives is the rollout of an enterprise resource planning software product across the 58 courts, a project known as the Court Accounting and Reporting System, or CARS.

The implementation of CARS in California's trial courts is unlike most rollouts of ERP technology in state and local government. In fact, several features of CARS make the project more comparable to ERP installations in the commercial world than in the public sector. California's trial courts are decentralized and use diverse business practices and an assorted array of financial systems. One major objective of CARS is to standardize business processes and technology so that the state has both an individual and consolidated perspective of the financial performance of the trial courts.

Another aspect of the CARS project that mirrors commercial ERP installations is the creation of a shared services center--the Accounting Processing Center, or APC--to perform administrative and financial tasks for the trial courts. Consolidating trial court administrative responsibilities in the APC promotes efficiency through scale economies and business process standardization. For governments to optimize the value of an ERP investment, organizational restructuring is often necessary to support newly designed business processes. Yet the reorganization and consolidation of functions during an ERP installation is a relatively rare phenomenon in public sector implementations.

The CARS project has one more distinguishing feature--the use of a private firm to provide ongoing maintenance and support of the ERP system. The outsourcing of the system support function to a third-party firm is known as "application hosting," while the providers of such services are called "application service providers," or ASPs. As the CARS system is deployed for each trial court, support responsibility is turned over to the ASP. Although there is considerable interest and discussion surrounding the ASP concept, few public sector organizations have adopted this approach because of the anxiety of turning over mission critical systems to an outside entity.

For all of these reasons, AOC's rollout of CARS to California's trial courts is a unique opportunity to examine the implementation of ERP in a complex environment. This article describes California's ambitious effort to consolidate the financial functions of the state's trial courts into a single statewide system. The discussion will provide useful insights to other state governments considering similar fiscal accountability initiatives for their court systems. Large and complex state and local governments--even those that are not facing trial court consolidation issues--that are wrestling with technology modernization and applications replacement will also benefit from some of the lessons learned.

CASE FOR ACTION

CARS is the result of a three-year planning process that has occurred in the context of a state fiscal crisis and other challenges facing the largest trial court system in the United States. The idea of ERP was proposed in response to the Trial Court Funding Act (otherwise known as AB 233 or the Lockyer-Isenberg Trial Court Funding Act), which mandated the transfer of the financial oversight of the trial courts to the California Judicial Council, which is a state agency. The problem was that no single financial system existed within the organization which could easily review the financial activities of these courts to enable AOC to fulfill its new oversight role as required by AB 233. AOC planners proposed the implementation of a statewide ERP system to meet these needs.

The planners were aware of the immense complexities of installing such a system when they proposed it, and they were particularly concerned about the organizational changes and...