The Law and Justice Systems Division of the County Administrator's Office is responsible for directing, planning and managing the functional development of the County's law and justice information systems (LJIS), and conducting business analysis, change management and system re-engineering activities on behalf of the County's justice departments (District Attorney, Probation, and Public Defender). This Division coordinates, on behalf of the County Administrator, with all local law enforcement agencies and the California Department of Justice to ensure that the LJIS and the County's automated warrant system are meeting the information needs and requirements of the agencies.
The County's LJIS is an integrated legacy ‘green screen’ mainframe system developed in the 1980s that allows for the sharing of data between the County's justice departments and the Superior Court. The Sheriff’s Department and other local agencies also query this system and the related countywide warrant system for information. The County has been working for the last ten years to migrate these complex systems to modern web-based platforms, but there is no one proprietary system that will serve all needs. Consequently, several systems must be planned and implemented to replace the mainframe system, which is rapidly reaching obsolescence. Individually, these systems are complex but must also be designed to exchange information across departments and agencies and in a secure manner that comports with the strict legal requirements governing the storage and exchange of criminal justice information.
The adopted strategy is to migrate these systems in a manageable sequence, beginning with the District Attorney's Prosecutor by Karpel system, of which the first phase was implemented in 2015, and followed by the Probation Department, and finally, the Public Defender's Office. Additionally, replacement of the County's automated warrant system management system has taken immediate precedence as the mainframe warrant system has shown signs of instability and is no longer supported by IBM. The Superior Court is, likewise, beginning to migrate its systems to modern platforms beginning with the traffic system.
The implementation of modern, vendor-developed systems has required the Business Systems Manager to assume the additional duties of contract negotiation and management, managing multiple systems on different technology platforms, managing multiple large data conversion and system roll-out projects, developing and managing multiple system interfaces, and coordinating system modifications across separate but integrated systems. The Division he manages needs more help, particularly with maintaining multiple large, complex County systems, preparing requests for proposals, testing and validating programming, and performing systems analysis and programming duties. We have determined that the Information Systems Programmer IV job class will better meet the current needs of the LJIS Division than the Senior Business Systems Analyst job class.