High Court of Justice of the State of Hidalgo, Mexico - Silver Medal 2008

Within the framework of e-governance developed by the Government of Mexico – with the purpose of improving the quality and transparency in management and increasing the efficiency in public services – the High Court of the State of Hidalgo implemented an Integral Program of Processes Systematization. The project included the integration of tasks of 51 first instance courts and their second instance courts, each one of them with numerous individual, complex, and manual processes. In addition, all the value chain participants – both internal and external - were integrated: Organization (Courts, Courtrooms); citizens (Lawyers, parties involved in the trial), and the Government.

The implementation, which was granted the Award to Innovation and Quality 2007, allowed saving unproductive time linked to jurisdictional and administrative paperwork, reducing the average time of legal actions resolution, increasing drastically the transparency in management and getting traceability and total control of the process.

Overview


The Integral Program of Processes Systematization (BPM) - implemented by the High Court of Justice of the State of Hidalgo, Mexico – arose as an answer to the constant need of citizens for more immediate and agile means for the support and solution of disputes, within the framework of the e-government strategy developed by the National Government. The project development was guided by the following strategic goal: to promote and monitor, through a BPM platform, the unlimited compliance as required by law respecting the rights and freedoms directly fighting lack of transparency and impunity.

The project included the integration of tasks of 51 first instance courts and their second instance courts and consisted of migrating all the processes inherent to each court to a single and centralized process applicable to each institution of the 17 cities making up the State of Hidalgo.

Apart from unification and automation of the different processes and manual tasks, the project integrated all the value chain participants: Organization (Courts, Courtrooms); citizens (Lawyers, parties involved in the trial), and the Government. For each one of them there are different benefits and functionalities described throughout the document, amongst which are: transparency portal, online file control, judicial funds management; among the main ones.

The implementation was granted the Award to Innovation and Quality 2007, prize awarding the best practices of technological innovation and government innovation in public management; it aims at strengthening knowledge management and creative participation of public officers as regards modernization and quality of the services offered.

The solutions administers an annual average of 40,000 legal actions and leads to the following main benefits:
• Time saving of administrative paperwork: 90%.
• Time saving of jurisdictional paperwork: 60%.
• Reduction in the average length of a trial. Before the process implementation, trials lasted 2 years or more; after the process automation and unification, this period was reduced to 1 year.
• Time reduction when submitting records; from 30 seconds before the implementation to 1 second after the implementation.
• This time saving as regards downtime goes up to 10,000 hours per year for citizens and staff. This is a consequence of the online traceability of files and status which considerably reduces the visits to the places where the documents are found.
• Goal fulfillment of management transparency, through government indicators which measure technological innovation and quality.
• Traceability of the process and employee control.


Business Innovation



The development of the project has a strong impact on the main participants of the value chain, linking internal and external participants to the organization, geographically distributed throughout the State of Hidalgo, Mexico, including: Organization (Courts, Courtrooms); citizens (Lawyers, parties involved in the trial), and the Government.

Benefits and functionalities for the members of the High Court of Justice.

At the level of the organization’s participants, three main benefits are presented: traceability and on-line follow-up, judicial funds management, information security with access in accordance to profiles, and Business Intelligence tools.

Traceability and online follow-up.
After implementing the project, public officers can have detailed information of the process stage in which the legal action is, as regards the status and physical location of the file. Sentences corresponding to each event can also be accessed to on-line.

Judicial funds management:
The process also includes the Judicial funds management, which consists of handling values on consignment to the court when, in some cases, one of the parties makes payment deposits. This is so; for example, when a father pays alimony for his children to the court while the trial is in process and until the legal custody is determined. The judicial fund gives the money to the mother when the process is finished and it ensures law enforcement.
Value handling by the judicial fund is an extremely careful and priority task. Through the BPM solution inclusion, it was possible to establish clearly the value handling within the court, which also allowed tracking its location both in the courts and in the fund itself, offering total transparency in the process.

Access to information in accordance with profiles.
The third key point that manifests the impact of the implementation at business level in the internal participants of the organization is the access to information in accordance with user profiles.

Business Intelligence Tools.
Having access to centralized management information to make decisions and to plan the public administration is another of the central contributions of the solution. This allows having quantitative and qualitative information of the execution of defined processes, bottle necks and budget execution. It also allows the total control of the management with clear, accurate and objective metrics.

Citizens
The solution also allows providing a high added value service for citizens: control and on-line follow-up of legal actions and files statuses.

It is done by the list notification system published on the Internet in the portal: http://148.245.145.212/notificaciones/frm_busqueda_notificaciones.aspx, where an information service which benefits lawyers involved in the trials and the parties is offered.

The notification is published automatically once a resolution in relation to an event is achieved, and it allows informing the parties about the “process status” and "the result". This notification is automated for all the courts participating in the project: 17 courts in 17 cities geographically distributed in judicial districts.

In the portal, the main functionalities offered to the citizens are:
• To consult the notifications by entity
• To consult the court to which he/she was assigned
• To assign several search filters (e.g. file number or date on which the notification was issued)

The notification system can be accessed from Internet 24/7.

State and Federal Government
There are two main contributions offered by the solution in the integration of participants belonging to the government: transparency in management and information security.

Transparency portal.
At government level, the main benefit offered by the solution is the transparency portal, which can be accessed by the following URL: http://www.pjhidalgo.gob.mx/trans/index.php. Transparency, apart from being the core of the Program for Institutional Strengthening, is an obligation on the part of the Federal and State Government and all their institutions.

This transparency portal allows users to:
• Review all the documentation related to transparency regulations.
• Consult information request statistics in real time.
• Review the transparency publications in all the corresponding instances.
• Request detailed information about salaries, wages, commissions, legal operation, among others.
• Link with INFOMEX system through the website to request non-restricted information for the citizens.
• Settle an accountability culture.

Apart from accountability and information transparency, the system is linked through the process to the publication of sentences of each matter dealt both in the first and second instance processes and for civil, criminal and family matters.

Information security: access by profiles.
Also in the case of external users belonging to National and State Government, the solution proposes an information access scheme through profiles, which ensures confidential information security.