Upgrading hardware
The Clerk’s Office for the Cook County, Ill., Circuit Court is upgrading its computer system from one that connects employees to a mainframe computer with “dumb” terminals to one that uses thin client appliances connected to the mainframe and a Windows server. The hardware replacement has eliminated an antiquated system, improved productivity and laid the foundation for additional technology advancements in the office.
The Cook County Circuit Court is one of the nation’s largest consolidated court systems. Employing more than 2,300 people at 17 locations, the court handles approximately 2 million cases a year. The Court Clerk’s office serves more than 400 judges and 5.1 million residents in the county, which includes Chicago and its 126 suburbs.
When the current clerk, Dorothy Brown, ran for office in 2000, she campaigned on the platform of upgrading the court’s technology. At the time of Brown’s election, the Clerk’s Office ran all of its operations on a 1980s-era mainframe, did not use e-mail or voicemail, and provided only limited public Internet access to court operations. Most of the employees in the office used green-screen “dumb” terminals that consisted of display screens and keyboards connected to a mainframe.
Shortly after taking office, Brown established a Transition and Strategic Planning Committee to review operations and to recommend improvements. The committee’s 200-page report found that the technologies used in the Clerk’s Office reduced its ability to serve a jurisdiction as large and diverse as Cook County.
After investigating a variety of computing architectures, Craig Wimberly, chief information officer of the Clerk’s Office, and Bridget Dancy, network services and support director, decided to replace the terminals with thin client desktop appliances by King of Prussia, Pa.-based Neoware Systems. Each thin client appliance has a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but it does not have a central processing unit like a PC. The appliances interact with the office’s mainframe and, with the installation of a Windows server, give employees access to the Internet and Windows software with lower up-front and operation costs than a network of PCs. By last month, 85 percent of the appliances had been installed, and the office plans to install the rest by the end of the year.
With the new system, the office will be able to enhance system performance by upgrading servers instead of replacing desktop PCs. At $500 for each appliance, “thin clients allow us to provide access to any application, at less than half the up-front cost of a PC,” Wimberly says. “We are able to provide access to modern applications with significantly greater security than we can with PCs. In the future, we’ll be able to roll out applications more quickly with thin clients because we can install the applications on the servers without the need to upgrade individual personal computers.”
E-mail service will be available to all employees by the end of the year. The office also plans to launch an intranet where policies and procedures will be stored for all employees to access from their desktops.
All employees are being trained to use the new equipment and software. “I wanted everyone to have the basic understanding of the computer, whether they use the computer everyday or not,” Brown says. “If I’m going to have e-mail and the Internet for everyone, then people need to have basic computer skills in order to be able to use them.”
As a result of installing the new hardware, the office has increased the speed at which employees can process case information, and employee morale has improved. “Data entry occurs in a more timely fashion,” Wimberly says. “Employee morale has really jumped. Our staff sees that we are investing in the tools that they need. They also see that when they sit down to enter, update or retrieve case information, it happens much more quickly. They say they are processing information 50 percent faster than they were before.”
