The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, through the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, awarded a $50,000 grant to the Division of State Court Administration for the development of the Indiana Courts Online Reports (ICOR) program.
The ICOR application, which was developed in-house by our JTAC staff, is a web-based program and is part of the judicial INcite portal through which trial courts load requested data into a state database. ICOR provides a secure method for the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, and dissemination of court statistics. It also streamlines the reporting process and makes the collected data more easily searchable and readily available. Most importantly, the new automated data reporting application has increased the accuracy and consistency of the reporting process.
The Division of State Court Administration (STAD) is charged by law to collect from all courts extensive case and financial data and to publish such data in an annual report, the Indiana Judicial Service Report. Until ICOR’s implementation, the 400+/- Indiana trial courts reported thousands of data elements per year on paper forms. By its very nature, this enormous manual exercise was subject to delay and error. The ICOR program now allows courts to compile the information electronically and in real time.
“When the material arrived at the Division of State Court Administration the long, manual compilation process would begin, and it would take months before the information was all gathered into one report. Often, errors and omissions would not become evident until totals were tabulated and comparisons to prior years were made,” said James Walker, Director of Trial Court Management.
In the past, the thousands of pieces of data had to be tabulated first at the local level, and then at the Division. With ICOR’s automated functions, the chances of errors are greatly reduced in the reporting process. “With formulas built into the application, calculation errors should be eliminated, much to everyone’s relief,” said Walker.
The data collected from each court includes the number of cases filed, cases disposed, the method of case disposition, the court’s probation caseloads, all moneys expended on the courts, and the revenues generated through their operations.
And in not too distant a future, the state-wide case management system, Odyssey, which first went live on December 17, 2007, in the Monroe Circuit Courts and the Marion County, Washington Township Small Claims Court, will interface with ICOR so that the data will be delivered directly from Odyssey to the ICOR application. This technological advancement is another item on the extensive menu of innovations shepherded by the Supreme Court’s Judicial Technology and Automation Committee.
In addition to reporting statistics, ICOR data will assist STAD in analyzing new case filings and judicial resources using Weighted Caseload Measurements (WCM). WCM helps to ensure an even distribution of cases between judges and to determine how much assistance courts need to handle heavy caseloads.