- And so, Michael, thanks very much for joining us today.
Very much appreciate you being with us here today
and sharing your experiences.
Could you do me a favor and tell me a little bit
about your organization's mission
and whose lives are mostly impacted
from what you do and, and how's the community benefit?
- Sure.
So I work for the San Bernardino County
District Attorney's office
and I've been here for about 23 years.
We are the public prosecutor who charges individuals
with crimes as defined by the California Penal Code.
In terms of who we affect, obviously,
we affect every person who's charged with a crime.
And so a system that we would have would envision working
to make that process more streamlined,
but we also not only impact them,
but every individual who is a victim of all those crimes
that are committed.
As you can imagine with every government entity,
we have limited resources.
And even though we have limited resources
and crime is increasing on a nationwide level,
what we have to do is be able to review and prosecute cases
as effectively and as efficiently as we can
with the resources we are given.
- So the impact that you have is quite large
for your community, and I would say mission critical
in many ways.
Can you gimme an idea or share a little bit
with what the problem is,
or was that you were trying to solve?
- Absolutely.
So, we had a case management system,
and if you can imagine, our case management system
at the time that we went to what we refer to now
as STAR:TNG, a Dynamics appliance,
was 26 years old and it was 26 years old built
on 26 year old technology.
And the thing that I would have to explain
to a lot of our colleagues is, imagine if you will,
the computer that you had 26 years ago, or the phone,
if you had a cell phone, 26 years ago.
There have been significant changes
but we never were able to meet the changes that occurred,
not just technologically, but also in terms
of software development.
And so our system was pretty stagnant,
and it really didn't help us make decisions
or evaluate things as much as it did,
it just tracked what we did day to day.
And that was it.
It was a very paper-driven process.
The system was very limited.
So when the organization grew in those 26 years,
we basically resorted to Microsoft Excel
or other hand-driven solutions to deal with issues
in our office that should have been dealt with
in a case management system
that encompassed the entire organization.
- So, and thanks very much, Michael.
I know we spent a lot of time together as two organizations,
as partners, coming up with the right solution
for the challenge you just outlined.
Can you share a little bit with me
about what that was like, the process,
and what we all ultimately came up with?
That'd be great.
- Yeah.
So it's, the ultimate solution was a case management system
that was built on a Dynamics platform.
Now the greatness of working kind
of with Microsoft with this
is that at the time when we first started,
we had a concept of what we were trying to build,
and it was a system that would encompass all aspects
of our organization.
The lawyers and their unique functions,
our victim advocates and their unique functions,
the Bureau of Investigation and their unique functions,
and then all of our support teams and their unique functions
because our case management system before that
never contemplated, for example, some of those,
the Bureau of Victim Services
or our Bureau of Investigation.
It really only handled very small portions of what we did.
So we wanted to find a system
that would contemplate the interplay
of all of those sections within our office,
and this solution really worked to do that;
such that each one of us, depending on our role,
we have a different view of the system,
based on the aspect that we do, the activity that we do.
And so, for example,
our lawyers who do initial filing and review of cases,
they're able to look at people,
they're able to match people to see are they individuals
that we have seen previously in our organization,
where they've either been a victim,
or a defendant, or a suspect before.
It allows our clerks to be able to promulgate data
to the courts, electronic filing of cases
through complaints, informations, or other documents,
electronic subpoenas, including SMS notifications,
text notifications to our law enforcement partners
when they're needed in court,
if the case gets continued, or if the case gets canceled.
It also allows us to communicate directly
with our Bureau of Investigation.
In the past, we'd have to fill out forms,
triplicate forms at one point
as to what we would need them to do.
Now, through STAR:TNG it's pretty much clicks of the button
as it relates to a case.
And the system actually tracks when we made that request,
who made that request, when it was fulfilled,
if it couldn't be fulfilled and why.
And then for the lawyer who's in the courtroom,
it's a system that they can reach
and touch any time they're in the courtroom with any device.
They can see what the current status of the case is.
If they are looking at a particular defendant
that they're prosecuting, they can look at back cases,
previous cases, the prior police reports on those cases
to see am I making the right offer based
on the entirety of their record.
Or if they don't have a record,
they can immediately determine that,
especially if they have similar names
to make sure the person that I'm looking at
is really this record versus the potential mistake
of connecting them to other records
that they were potentially connected to in the past.
So what the system does is it gives great flexibility
to the individual based on their function
to be able to more effectively do their job.
- That's amazing.
And it'd be interesting.
What did the attorneys say?
What are the folks say that are using the system?
Any learnings that you've had so far to this point?
- Sure.
Yes.
And when I think of learnings, first and foremost,
our lawyers who are in the courtroom recognize
it does a lot more than it ever did.
That is to say they can track the things
that are are happening.
If they communicate, for example,
with a victim, or witness, or member of the office
and they do those communications through STAR:TNG,
it fully leverages the power of O-365.
And what happens then, is they can promulgate an email,
they can make a phone call through Dynamics,
using Outlook, using Teams, so that all the connectivity
of Office 365 with Dynamics is embedded and it grows.
So as changes are done to Dynamics, to Office 365,
we realize those changes as a force multiplier
in our organization.
They are able to track things they've never tracked.
For example, if a defense attorney does a particular thing
in a particular case, one of our lawyers logs it
in their particular case, they can do a search and see, oh,
this is how this defense attorney,
or how this judge has handled things in the past.
There are also challenges.
So, we are working to digitize pretty much everything
in our organization, including our past.
So past police reports, we want to over time now,
because of Dynamics 365,
we can host, house that within our STAR:TNG appliance.
A lot of our colleagues who handled the very beginning
of cases, there is an added workload for them,
but that added workload really minimizes the work
down the chain as the case goes through the process.
What I mean by that is
they review their case electronically,
they immediately mark once they make the determination file
that certain matters or certain materials need
to be handed over to the defense.
Rather, what would happen in the past, we would copy them,
make multiple copies of them, put 'em in a bucket,
a defense attorney's representative would have to grab it
at some point.
Sometimes that can take a week.
Sometimes that can take longer.
If there were changes in lawyers, they would have to,
we'd have to get it back, or it'd be destroyed,
and we'd have to make copies of it again.
Well, the beauty of Dynamics 365 is portals for us,
and with portals now, within 15 minutes
of our lawyers at the outset marking discovery
for delivery to defense attorney,
it's made available to them,
15 minutes after the case is filed.
Whereas it would be in the past,
maybe several days a week it would take
for them to get the discovery.
Now they have it readily available within 15 minutes,
so that they'll be able
to effectively represent their client as quickly
as we make the decision to,
that we will be filing criminal charges against them.
- Amazing.
That's amazing, that turnaround time.
That's phenomenal, Michael.
Are there other metrics that you've seen so far,
maybe some surprise that you've seen
in terms of efficiencies that you didn't expect
or are meeting or exceeding your expectations?
'Cause I want you to share with me,
in terms of evidence sharing
and case disclosure to the defense,
that's pretty amazing going from days and weeks
down to less than an hour.
That's amazing.
- It is.
You know, there are, I will tell you what we love
about Dynamics 365 is not so much what it does
in terms of the replacement
of our prior case management system,
but about all the other possibilities after that,
is the ability to look at that data
and use Power BI to evaluate how we're doing things.
Are we doing things as effectively as we used to?
And it gives us the ability as managers
to look at what we are doing.
And many times people look at that
in a one-dimensional context.
For example, the number of cases we file.
Many people would look at that as a raw number.
Well the beauty with Dynamics and with Power BI
is not only do we see that raw number,
but we can drill down under that number,
based on our divisions.
We have three, we are the largest county
in the United States with over 20,000 square miles.
We have three large offices spread out geographically,
and we're able to look at the activity, for example,
of each particular lawyer in the filing function
at each of those locations,
to see how many cases are they reviewing?
What is the percentage of the cases
in which they reject or decide not to file?
How often they will look at things.
And the reality is we're not looking
at it in one-dimensional aspect.
For example, you could see a raw number,
but we could actually then drill down with Power BI
to see the acuity of the particular cases we're looking at.
For example, some of 'em may do fewer cases,
but the complexity of those cases we can see
by the types of charges,
and now there's an explanation of that.
So you don't look at just the number,
you can look at the story beneath that
to see are they effective?
And so you might see smaller numbers
with a particular person,
but the depth of what they're doing
is significantly greater than others, such that it explains
why they're not having the same volumes
as one of their colleagues right down the hall.
- That's amazing. - And that's amazing
for staffing models, for staffing,
and frankly, for us to see that we do need more staff,
but now we actually have the empirical data
to show we need more staff to do a particular function.
- That's amazing, Michael, and it's great.
Every time I hear stories shared around optimization
and kind of modifying workflows
and making people's lives a little bit easier,
better access to information, for me personally,
it brings a smile to my face and gets me really excited
about some of the work that we've been doing together
and the partnership.
Let me ask you a question.
Why Microsoft?
I mean, there's a lot of folks out there these days
that can help provide capability.
Why did you, why did you choose us?
- Well, Paul, it's a great question.
And, it wasn't something that we came to immediately.
When we were looking to make changes
to our case management system as early as 2011, 2012,
we were trying to figure out what type of system.
Do we go with an out of a box solution
that people built for prosecutors?
That was a potential option.
But the reality is those products that were out there
at the time weren't even as sophisticated
as the system we currently had, which was, you know,
in its 20, it had been over 20 years old at that point.
We looked at other CRM platforms that are web-based.
In fact, we actually bought one to test one
in a very finite area of our organization to see, hey,
is this web-based CRM type appliance, it's CRM also,
would it be helpful for us on a larger scale?
The reality is it wasn't going to work.
The ability to have more customization wasn't something
that that system was going to be able to provide.
We also looked potentially
at Microsoft Partners to assist us.
And we indeed even tested one to see in another small area,
would it be the way to go
to build our large case management system?
And the answer was the amount of sophistication we wanted,
they weren't going to be able to provide that as well
as Microsoft Consulting could.
A big reason why is that we needed to deal
with areas of scale as it applied
to the district attorney's office,
and Microsoft was used to that.
We were small compared to Microsoft's clients,
where they may serve large government organizations,
state prosecutors' offices, Attorney General's offices.
We were relatively small.
While we were the fifth largest in our state,
I would characterize us as small as it applied to Microsoft.
But the beauty of going with Microsoft
is they never treated me like the small person.
They treated me like I was a partner with them
in building a solution.
They listened, they spent the time
to understand what we did, how we did it.
And they helped us challenge ourselves to figure out
is there a better way to do things
in light of the new technology that exists?
And so for us, when we made the initial investment
with Microsoft in a small portion of it,
over time we started to make larger and larger investments,
as we grew the plan to build the case management system
to where it's at today, and our hope is
that it might build even more in the future.
- Yeah, that's great, Michael, thank you.
I can tell you what, I know for a fact
there are a lot of other DAs around the US
that would very much like the system that you have today.
And I just want to say thank you for trusting us
to partner with you, to make this become a reality.
And, you know, obviously very much have enjoyed it
and it has truly been a partnership.
And, you know, we're very much looking
to where this goes next.
And I want to thank you again for working with us
and really excited about all the metrics,
and the opportunities, and the enhanced workflows,
and the like that have come from the system.
It's absolutely outstanding and amazing.
So thank you.
- Absolutely.
And you know, Paul, the beauty of this
is that the future is even brighter.
What I mean by that is the one thing with Dynamics
and with Microsoft is we know that change is a part
of our structure, part of our world.
And the beauty is I think that Dynamics
and Microsoft is prepared to help us venture
into wherever that's going to happen.
This year, we see a lot of new legislative changes
which will affect us.
I don't worry about them like I used to in the past,
because we're on CRM and we're in Dynamics in a cloud.
And I know that the system that we have
is malleable enough to change as times change,
as environments change.
And so we're really fortunate to have Microsoft
as a partner as we look forward
to the next decade or two or even three.
- Fantastic.
Thank you, Michael.
I really appreciate your time today.
- Thank you.