Supreme tech

Indiana Supreme Court IT director, IU Indy-Law grad, Kurt Snyder is featured in the March issue of Government Technology as one of its annual “Doers, Dreamers and Drivers.” He is featured for his efforts since 2000 to create a centralized system for Indiana’s court technology. He has found the going tough:

Getting elected officials to work together can be difficult at times, and judges are some of the most independent-minded elected officials you could have,” he said. “Getting those things changed [standardization, centralization] is difficult to do. So a county [court] that has never been told what do to by someone else — it’s difficult for them to change.

Link.

It seems that Mr. Snyder has accomplished much of the Supreme Court’s vision for laying out a unified technology system for state courts, but I still question whether the Court is best positioned to lead Indiana’s courts to the future of technology. It seems to me that this move gives the Supreme Court a path to much greater centralized control of the county courts than they have previously had through judicial opinions and disciplining judges.

Independent companies, like Doxpop (which has provided online access to 20 of Indiana’s 92 counties to date), have been able to move much more quickly, and have provided an effective system that is responsive to its users without costing the taxpayers a dime.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 6th, 2005 at 10:33 am and is filed under Techno Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.