With support from SJI, a working group of court practitioners and other subject matter experts established by the Joint Technology Committee (JTC) of the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA), the National Association for Court Management (NACM) and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) assembled a NextGen Court Business Process Model.  Other participating organizations included the Court Information Technology Officers Consortium (CITOC) and the IJIS Institute (IJIS).

This report outlines the Court Business Process (CBP) Model that was developed and approved by the NextGen Court Technology Standards Working Group.  Its work updates and further informs information originally examined in 2003.  Developed in the first phase of the project and released in 2016, the CBP defined the case type layer of the model and initiated a secondary level of definition – business process categories.  As the project team commenced, it became apparent that the work could not be performed without also addressing a third layer of the model, the business process groups. The original project proposed to complete the second and third layers of the model during phase two, but a substantial part of this work already has been completed.

The NextGen approach to a CBP Model is designed to be unique and offers the capacity of understanding the work of the judicial branch in an entirely new way.  Some key elements are:

• Better modeling of the business processes can lead to more effective automation and improved court productivity.
• Within the context of reused elementary business processes, case management system modules that support those processes can be integrated and reused in a manner that precisely meets the needs of each particular court system.
• Provision of a clear and concise understanding of specific business processes in a format that is both comprehensive and economical will lead to greater intersection with Business Process Groups (claims, hearings, trials, etc.) and Business Process Categories (case type).

Second phase work includes NextGen Court Technology Standards that will address implementation of concepts.  Later this Spring, the JTC plans to release a follow-up report culminating all of this work.