Front Conference Room Supreme Court, Bismarck July 2, 2009 8:00 a.m.
Members Participating Dale Sandstrom, Supreme Court Justice, Committee Chair Lee Ann Barnhardt, Director of Education & Communication Rita Fischer, Deputy Clerk of District Court Sally Holewa, State Court Administrator Joel Medd, District Judge Penny Miller, Clerk of Supreme Court Ross Munns, sitting in for Donna Wunderlich, Trial Court Administrator Daniel Narum, District Judge
Members Absent Becky Absey, Clerk of District Court William Herauf, District Judge Doug Mattson, District Judge Frank Racek, District Judge
Guests Jim Gienger, Project Manager for UCIS Replacement Project Rod Olson, Member of the Operations Oversight Group
Staff Larry Zubke, Director of Technology
Minutes Marlys Kienzle
The meeting was called to order by Chair Dale Sandstrom.
Approval of Minutes The minutes from April 3, 2009 were reviewed. Judge Narum moved/Rita Fischer seconded to
approve the minutes. Motion carried.
Update on the Odyssey Implementation Status Jim Gienger began his report with the Project Variance Report. A report was sent out that gives
a summary of the progress. Jim explained what type of data makes up the report. Each month
there is an update to give a better view of the accomplishments and what tasks need to be
addressed.
Mr. Gienger reported the project is currently 2.9% ahead of schedule and 7.1% over on cost.
Some of the reasons for the 7.1% overage in cost is attributed to spending more dollars now to
get things done quicker. Also, we have shifted some of the responsibilities and money budged
for data conversion and training. Tyler is spending more time on the data conversion than
originally planned, and we are going to take more of the responsibility for the training program as
we roll out phase three and four. Less than 10% variance is considered good.
System Enhancement Progress Mr. Gienger discussed a number of different meetings that are held. Weekly, the Tyler Project
Manager, Sally Holewa, Larry Zubke, Mr. Gienger and the Operation Oversight Group meet.
The enhancements that Tyler has built beyond their base product have all been developed and
tested and will be installed in Bismarck next Monday. There are 21 enhancements of which 19
will be installed now and 2 will be installed later.
Mr. Gienger reported that having Tyler develop and test them has saved us dollars and hours.
There were 7,680 hours allowed for the enhancements and we used less than 4,545 hours.
System Configuration Progress The configuration for reports, calendars and chargeable accounts (financial) is in progress. There
has been great progress made and should be done by the end of July.
Our focus now is configuring reports for Fargo. We also are going to have some meetings next
week regarding calendars. There will be meetings the next couple of weeks on conditions and
documents.
The financial portion of configuration does have some concerns and is not complete.
Clerks and the IT staff from around the state meet three days a week at lunch time to go over the
system configuration to review, ask questions and tweak issues that come up.
Data Conversion and Verification Progress Mr. Gienger reported on the five data pushes that need to be done before we go live in October.
To date, we have completed three data pushes. The number of errors continues to diminish with
each data push. We are reviewing this data on our Monday, Wednesday and Friday calls. Most
of the data is converted automatically but some data must be entered manually. It is important to
ensure that we have all the data accounted for.
Judge Sandstrom asked if the data is only Cass County's data or from all counties. Mr. Gienger
said it was data from Cass and Traill Counties. Mr. Gienger also explained that we are running
reports on the UCIS side and on the Odyssey side and reconcile the reports to ensure that all of
the data is accounted for.
Larry Zubke explained how data was migrated over. Tyler has a tool they call the IFL Tool
(Intermediary File Layout). This tool, once setup, systematically transfers the data from UCIS to
Odyssey. They will use this same tool and develope scripts when migrating data for other
counties.
Sally Holewa commented that there could be problems with the data conversion as there were
few edits or required fields in UCIS. With the large amount of event codes, only a few were used
and will not be valid when converted to Odyssey.
Judge Narum asked if the system will require the clerks to use uniform event codes and will there
be enforcement by this Administration by going out to these clerks and make sure the clerks are
entering data uniformly.
Sally Holewa said that there are two things that will help with uniform entering of the codes.
Odyssey event codes are specific to case types so the clerk's choices will be limited. Also, our
ongoing training strategy will be to continue to train after roll out.
Jim Gienger informed the committee that Odyssey's case types were added to improve the
accuracy of the data. The next data push is scheduled in August.
Interface Development Progress Jim Gienger explained that many of the 21 enhancements that Tyler is building include items for
the integrations or interfaces. Larry commented that there are eleven different interfaces that are
key to the pilot. His department is working on seven of them now. The developers are waiting
on some of the Odyssey enhancements to be released in July so the interfaces can be fully tested.
Document Management Progress The Tyler personnel were at Fargo and reviewed the work flow. They also went to Hillsboro and
will be coming back next week to present their findings and show their progress. They will also
be showing how the image process does and should work.
Training Plans The training is going to be delivered in Fargo at the end of September for 3 weeks. The first two
weeks will consist of classroom style training and the third week will be on the job training at the
courthouse. Tyler will be doing the initial training.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Interactive Web Response (IWR) Sonant and court staff are working on the software and hardware configuration. An initial
installation in early September is planned.<
E-Filing WIZNET is the vendor for this. This will be delivered and implemented in January. They have
said that they will have a detailed plan but Jim has not seen this yet but will follow up on it.
Judge Sandstrom asked for a clarification of dates for E-Filing. Jim Gienger gave these time
lines: E-Filing is going to be January 18th . October 12th is the go-live date for Odyssey. March 2010 is when we will be starting to work on E-Signatures. This is an extension of
imaging.
Sally Holewa made some comments on how well she felt the project was going. She does have
some concerns about our partners, especially the Attorney General's office to get their part done
on the protection orders in time.
Rod Olson felt that having Tyler in Fargo a few weeks ago was extremely helpful. They gave
several demonstrations to the clerks, recorders and the judges.
Rita Fischer felt the system would be easy to learn.
Justice Sandstrom commented that to date, a lot of people have been involved which will be very
helpful going forward.
Lee Ann Barnhardt mentioned that the training strategy will be to provide more training than
previously done with UCIS and to provide continuous updates more often on a timely basis.
Judge Medd asked if Odyssey will be slower to use in the courtroom than UCIS. Jim Gienger
said that Tyler has a new product they call the Courtroom Module which we believe will help
speed up the sentencing process and the selection of multiple condition codes. Tyler has said it
won't be available until the 3rd quarter and it will be a billable item.
Jury System Issue with Jury Summons Being Sent to Underage Persons Larry Zubke said that every two years we build a new jury database which is created from a
combination of voter data and DOT data. As a billable service, our vendor, Courthouse
Technologies (CHT), creates the list for us. This year we discovered that jury summons were
being sent to underage persons. This occurred because of state ID cards being created for
underage persons. Upon investigating the problem, we also discovered that CHT was not
considering the date of birth as they created the database. Since then we have run a query against
the database to exclude the underage persons. This was fixed last week.
Justice Sandstrom asked if it was possible to have someone's name in the pool more than once.
Larry Zubke said that they would not be in the pool more than once unless they spelled their
name differently and/or listed two different addresses.
Judge Sandstrom asked how we could include those people in the jury database who will turn
eighteen within a few months. Sally Holewa said that she has been discussing with Larry how
they could best do that and was considering an annual pool instead of the current biennial pool.
Judge Joel Medd thought that this may be something that could be brought up at the Jury
Management Committee.
Cell Phone Replacement Project Status Larry Zubke reported that he did a quick survey in April as to the satisfaction of the current cell
phone service and phones. The survey results showed that 50% of the users were dissatisfied
with the Alltel service and 80% were dissatisfied with the Treo phones. Research was completed
on what it would take to replace the Treo phones and associated email server. It was decided that
a Blackberry solution was the best way to proceed. With Alltel's future being unknown, it was
decided to switch to a Verizon / Blackberry solution. Verizon gave the courts an excellent price
on the server licenses and phones. Each user had a choice of three different phone models to
choose from. Larry indicated that the new Blackberry server is running and his staff will be
replacing the phones throughout the months of July and August. The Treo server will remain
operational until the end of the year.
Tyler Courts & Justice User Conference and Court Technology Conference Sally Holewa asked for suggestions as to who should attend the conference. Judge Sandstrom
suggested that an e-mail be sent out to see what the interest is and then encourage other key
players to go.
For the Good of the Order Discussion as to when the judges where going to be trained in Odyssey. Both Sally Holewa and
Rod Olson said that one day of training will be scheduled for the Judges.
Judge Narum questioned if there was going to be Web access to Odyssey. Larry Zubke said as
long as the user has VPN access, they will be able to access Odyssey directly. The Odyssey
public search site will also be accessible by anyone without any special software.