The Business Systems Manager job class is a single-position class utilized within the Law and Justice Systems Division of the County Administrator's office. The position 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 position 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 for information.
In September 2008, the Board of Supervisors authorized the County Administrator to invite proposals for a new computer system to replace the County’s aging LJIS. The proposal was precipitated by the Superior Court’s announced intention to switch to a new statewide calendaring and court management system by 2012. Where in 2008 the initiative to move the Justice Partners’ case management system off of the County mainframe was considered a strategic planning decision, it is now essential to do so for reasons extending beyond the Superior Court's planned switch. The LJIS has served the County incredibly well for 30 years but is quickly becoming obsolete. The employees with the institutional knowledge and technical know-how to maintain the archaic mainframe system have recently retired and the requisite technical skill sets are difficult to attract into public service and take many years to develop. Consequently, it is imperative to migrate all County mainframe systems to modern platforms and the County Administrator's Office has been working ambitiously with the justice departments to do so. 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's implementation of the Capita Case Management System, which was approved by the Board in March 2014 and is currently in the planning phase. A public defender case management system will follow, as well as replacement of the automated warrant system.
With the waning of the County's mainframe system and the advent of modern, stand-alone justice systems that must be integrated to work seamlessly with both the current mainframe system and with whatever system the Superior Court decides to implement, the job responsibilities and duties of the Business Systems Manager have rapidly increased in complexity, required knowledge, and consequence of error. The implementation of modern, vendor-developed systems requires 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 Human Resources Department conducted a salary study of this classification and recommends that the class be reallocated on the Salary Schedule to reflect the significant evolution of responsibility and complexity of the job.
Should this action not be approved, the County will be unable to appropriately compensate the Business Systems Manager classification which has rapidly increased in complexity, required knowledge, and consequence of error.