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Rural justice solutions touch many areas of social policy and concerns from a state and local level. There’s no clear answer to replacing a retiring workforce in a rural community or providing consistent law enforcement, but there are policies and clear technology strategies that can leverage funding effectively improve access to justice.
Consolidating Funding
for county courts through the state, but leaving day-to-day operations to the
district allows for more consistent spending on infrastructure and staffing (Reengineering Rural Justice in Minnesota).
Connecting Systems from other community and state organizations is critical between juvenile courts and tribal justice. The Federal Indian Child Welfare Act requires communication between the courts and tribal services to determine the best course of action for a juvenile offender. Telehealth and other community service programs and court systems/law enforcement records can be shared in real-time which can help offset poor internet access and bandwidth in rural areas.
Reducing or Eliminate Paper – If the process requires paper to move with the case or individual, it is inefficient and wastes time and too many man-hours in and out of the courtroom. A document capture solution, converting paper to electronic, searchable content is the foundation of automation.
E-filing and Case Management – Your organization may have court
automation in place. Does it extend to your most rural locations? Can a case be
filed, referenced or a sentence carried out electronically? Regardless of your
current system, this extension of technology is available. If there’s a case
number and a paper form, automation and improvements to access are possible. A
case number can populate an electronic form automatically with all relevant
information. A decision in the courtroom can automatically generate the next
workflow. This is a great example of enhancing an existing system with electronic
forms in the courtroom: ILINX at
Stanislaus.
Remote Access – Most experts agree defendants and defense attorneys should be in the same location, but they could be remotely engaging with the courtroom, or the courtroom could be mobilized. Although internet access in remote areas is an ongoing challenge, many document-driven interactions can be secured to locations like a library or post office with adequate bandwidth via either a kiosk or personal device.
ImageSource and our ILINX platform
can extend your courtroom and legal interactions to remote counties. Our ILINX
platform can engage with an existing system like Tyler, IBM or something homegrown.
ILINX can enable a remote courtroom and facilitate equal access.
Can we talk in more detail about your rural justice initiatives? ImageSource is providing a one-hour complimentary assessment of your current courtroom automation and delivering recommendations for improvement. If you are interested, please follow this link to sign up. We will contact you promptly to schedule the time.
The Rural Justice crisis and the pressure on State and County governments to find solutions is well documented. States that otherwise may not have much in common like Alaska, Nevada, New York, and North Dakota have all worked on policy and incentive programs for law enforcement and lawyers to reside and practice or serve in rural communities. It’s also recognized that urban courts have rural justice reach as they need to communicate to all involved in a court-related matter regardless of their location. Studies agree that traveling 200+ miles to see a lawyer or make a court appearance is not equal justice under the law.
The state of Nevada has found that leaving problem up to counties to solve has created legislative consequences. The state introduced a bill in 2015 that died in committee and passed Bill 377 in 2017 that created a commission to find solutions, but none have been implemented. In those two years, various counties in Nevada attempted to solve the problem independently. In November 2017, the ACLU filed suit against the state of Nevada for violating the 6th amendment in six rural counties (ACLU Sues Nevada).
Rural justice initiatives and solutions must include collaboration between systems of record for Law Enforcement, Child Welfare Services, and Tribal Courts. In 2006, the State of Alaska recognized the expansion of technology as one of the top five solutions to their rural justice crisis. They integrated their public health records, law enforcement records, tribal records, and court records to facilitate communication between all the organizations. This has been especially useful in communities where internet access isn’t guaranteed. Law Enforcement and Legal professionals can access all information in real-time and share with the individuals participating in the court system. The state has been especially creative holding court sessions in local facilities like high school gyms, decreasing the amount of travel for a defendant, plaintiff, lawyer or witness.
Are your counties, public departments, and indigenous communities communicating seamlessly to improve rural justice?
The full Initial Report and Recommendations of the Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission can be found here: Alaska Rural Justice
If you are looking for ways to maximize the value of business information, you can be successful with both proactive and reactive strategies. In this post, we’ll cover access to and visibility of your data and documents, in-process and while archived.
Granular configuration control over your content will yield efficiencies, promote compliance and enforce information security. By proactively controlling access, visibility and actions for each user or group, you will protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information. InfoSec can be achieved using administrative controls through Active Directory permissions and configuration settings in capture, workflow and repository software. When managed correctly, it exposes only that which each worker is qualified to see and/or act upon.
Information processing analytics allow you to gain visibility into your business processes, content data and information from external systems. This allows you to react immediately to potential problems to pinpoint risk potential long term. Customer transaction data to take a proactively nurture that relationship. Analytics dashboard can be specifically configured to provide different information to different groups, from business process managers to C-level executives.
Business process intelligence can help you:
Controlling access to your information should be easy to configure, but unfortunately in many systems it is not. ILINX information management software makes easy configuration a priority. Get administrative control over visibility and actions in ILINX Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow or ILINX Content Store, even without in-depth IT knowledge.
Our business intelligence platform, ILINX Analytics, is no different. It’s flexible and easy to use with any level of technology expertise. Depending on user permissions, you can expose data from any business system, from ECMs to ERPs. View and easily share reports. Expose, hide group and sort data, move columns and manipulate in multiple ways. And finally, gain visibility and insight into critical information that will improve information processing and help make better business decisions to boost your bottom line.
Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Integrate Data from All Systems to Optimize Business Process Management (BPM)
Meet compliance and regulatory policies to mitigate risk of litigation
Business systems integrations can greatly increase efficiencies, both during and after the processing of data and documents. While processing mid-stream, integration between workflows, repositories and legacy systems can expedite throughput, eliminate errors and provide critical analytical data real-time. This helps mitigate risk by enabling you to meet both service level agreements and regulatory compliance. Sometimes this can be done without a single-line of code.
Post-processing, it’s possible to retrieve and display images from within virtually any application regardless of source—host based, Windows, Web or Citrix—with little to no development. This provides a cohesive system that allows data to pass easily between two or more applications, saving time and increasing efficiencies.
RPA allows fluidity, enabling a more effective labor force. It’s like putting your high-volume, low complexity tasks on steroids! Employees can be repurposed to provide essential jobs that require personal, human interaction and collaboration.
An important advantage of RPA is that it can be implemented without major retooling of each business process. Simply integrate RPA into your existing systems to mimic the way your FTEs would interact with it.
Business process integrations are instrumental in helping save money by:
As consumers expectations grow for more customization and personalization of their financial services experience, RPA can enhance the performance of customer engagement platforms. It also improves data agility for systems that support analytics, branch optimization, channel management, compliance management, performance management, risk management and mobility. In addition, RPA can provide on-demand integration between schemaless data (data lakes) with any business system.
Basically, robotic data integration removes barriers and extends your control over a broad range of data types and sources to better deliver business value. Not only does data integration untether you from the limitations of information silos, but it can help unify formats and data management across files, tables and streams.
Although business systems integrations, particularly with RPA, can seem overwhelming, it is possible to find all of this functionality in one platform. The ILINX suite of information management software can provide all of the afore mentioned benefits using a combination of ILINX Capture, ILINX Capture Workflow, ILINX eForms, ILINX Advanced Capture, ILINX Content Store, ILINX RPA and ILINX Analytics. They work together seamlessly to automate the integration of all your critical business data and document, during and after processing.
Check out the 5 other posts in this series:
Ingest and Process Secure Data, Documents and Payments Real-Time During Customer Transactions
Extend Online Invoice Upload Capabilities to Business Partners
Advanced Automation and Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Maximize Efficiencies
Control the Flow of Information and Access to Manage Risk and Identify Problems
Meet compliance and regulatory policies to mitigate risk of litigation
Technology leaders are jumping on the Robotics Process Automation (RPA) technology bandwagon for good reason. It yields tremendous value in a myriad of business and industry sectors. RPA automates repetitive manual tasks performed by human workers, so their time can be used in higher value responsibilities. Because manual actions occur in so many different business processes, RPA is one of the most rapidly expanding technologies today.
Common business processes that can benefit from the use of RPA technology include, but are certainly not limited to:
Two primary factors are driving the demand and embrace of RPA: tremendous ROI and improved quality of service. Typically, investment costs can be recouped in a very short amount of time—often just a few months—while ongoing savings can be substantial. RPA allows you to process disputes faster and more accurately, 24x7x365.
One global IT company estimates that 62% of customers will consider switching to a competitor after only one or two unpleasant experiences. Besides saving taxpayer money, even government agencies need to supply great customer service through speed and accessibility. Think about USPS, who now competes head to head with UPS and FedEx for shipping services.
For the purpose of this blog, let’s take the case of a large multi-national financial institution (we’ll call them $-Corp) with a customer service call center operation. They employ hundreds of Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), spanning multiple countries. As with many large corporate environments, call centers typically utilize several systems in their day to day business. These generally include a CRM system. Often, the CRM will interface with to pass data to and/or require data be passed back by ERP systems and/or other Line of Business (LOB) systems. Any of these systems may be commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications or custom applications developed in house. Further, these systems may or may not have Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) that allow for easy back end integration.
In this case, customers call into the $-Corp Call Center to dispute items on their financial records. Typically, customers will send in supporting documentation for their disputes. As with all high-volume transaction environments, CSR’s work to process as many transactions per day as possible. Every keystroke and mouse click is measured. These actions relate to Average Call Handling time, which directly translates to cost of operations. Thus, $-Corp Call Center is a prime process candidate for reducing costs and improving the Average Call Handling time.
$-Corp Call Center utilizes a fully automated business process workflow to address the core functional requirements of their operations. Processing disputes involves repetitive tasks that must happen on every single transaction. Prior to harnessing the power of RPA, CSRs manually keyed dispute information into two systems: the CRM system (in this case Salesforce) and on multiple screens of a LOB application that is the system of record (Customer Dispute Information System, or CDIS). Although this aging technology and will be replaced with a proper CRM system at some point in the future, for now, the Call Center must utilize this custom developed front end user interface with an AIX database backend. This is where RPA has provided huge value.
The initial Call Center solution utilizes the Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) infrastructure already in place to automate the processing of supporting documents submitted by the customer. An import utility is used to capture incoming electronic documents from an upload portal on $-Corp’s website and convert them to TIFF files using a format conversion tool. Advanced Capture is used to OCR these documents, as well as scanned paper letters, forms, etc. that are mailed in. Extracted information is then infused as metadata into the workflow process that CSRs use to work through disputes with customers. When the CSR completes a dispute transaction and submits the record into the CDIS system, ILINX automatically passes the data to Salesforce.
Let’s circle back to the repetitive tasks requiring CSRs to manually key information. Since this data has been electronically captured and extracted, RPA agents (or bots) are utilized to update the CRM and LOB systems and monitor the updates for failures. RPA technology takes a push of XML data from a Salesforce dispute record and inserts that data into the various screens in the CDIS interface. It then submits the record and returns transaction information back to Salesforce.
The manual keying of that information into other systems, like $-Corp CSRs did before the bots took that task, can involve hundreds of keystrokes per case. It can also require specific formatting of the data. RPA addresses data formatting taking existing data from one source and apply it to another source, thus eliminating the possibility of human error when keying. By using RPA to execute the redundant and manual tasks, every single transaction, performed by hundreds of CSRs every day, shaves time off of the Average Call Handling time. In this environment, quickly completed transactions are king. The ROI, estimated by the Call Center staff for this solution, is significant. They expect to recoup the initial investment within year one.
The RPA solution alone was a significant benefit to the Call Center operations. Yet, RPA provides exponential value when coupled seamlessly with existing workflows, and associated backend processes: onboarding of electronic and paper content, OCR technology, integrations, etc. These ECM technologies further enhance a comprehensive and PCI compliant solution that is easily scalable as $-Corp continues to grow. Scaling the RPA solution can be as simple as adding additional VDIs or adding additional server resources to the solution to address additional volume.
Because of the successful deployment in the Call Center, $-Corp is currently investigating additional business processes in multiple departments that will benefit from RPA. With such sizable reductions in operational expenses and rapid ROI, they are anxious to find other areas to leverage the RPA capabilities in the ILINX ECM stack to achieve significant information technology wins.
