A one-day Case Tracking System (CTS) Change Management workshop was organized for frontline staff of Justice Sector Institutions (JSI) in Ho Volta region to strengthen their abilities in using the system.

It was on the theme: “Strategies and Tools to Strengthen the Adoption and Use of STCs for Leaders of Key Stakeholder Agencies”.

The workshop brought together representatives from the Judicial Service, Ghana Prison Service, Attorney General’s Office and Ministry of Justice, Ghana Police Service and Legal Aid Commission.

This was to ensure the leadership of the agencies, a better understanding of the components of the CTS (people, process, technology), so that they could adopt change management strategies to generate support for the use of the system by their staff.

The forum was also used to recommend the required tools and institutional strengthening requirements needed to strengthen the adoption and use of STC on behalf of the government.

CTS is an integrated criminal case tracking technology tool / application designed iteratively to digitize the manual tracking processes and lifecycle information of criminal justice agencies in Ghana, starting with the founding agencies.

This was in a statement jointly released and copied to the Ghanaian news agency by the workshop organizers, namely the Inter-Regional Bridge Group (IBG TECH), a local technology consultancy firm, the Legal Resources Center (LRC), Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Crime Check Foundation.

It was sponsored by the Justice Sector Support Activity of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID JSSA)

USAID JSSA aims to increase citizen knowledge and access to justice sector services, strengthen advocacy interventions for the accountability of key justice sector institutions to improve justice delivery, and increase citizen oversight and monitoring of criminal cases to improve the delivery of justice.

The statement said: “The CTS has the capacity to interrogate historical criminal data and its trends in communities, districts and all regions of Ghana, while harnessing real-time information sharing and coordination capacities. – towards the rapid, effective and efficient delivery of judicial processes ”, he declared.

He said the CTS also has the “business cycle” capacity of the Ghana Police Service or the Bureau of Economic and Organized Crime; the Legal Aid Commission or the Attorney General’s Office; the Judicial Service; and the prison administration.

“System integration components enable the benefits of digitized records and their processing in electronic case record format throughout its lifecycle,” he said.

Operational components for accessibility cover online, offline, and smart device / Android capabilities.

Workshop participants were guided through change management strategies and discussion sessions and the way forward for the CTS based on their experiences while using the system.

The statement said the issues highlighted in the focus groups were what worked and what did not work in piloting the system in the seven start-up regions (Greater Accra / Tema, Volta, Northern, Ashanti, Bono, Western and Upper East).

He said that participants and others noted that one of the setbacks in using the system was poor network connectivity and unreliable availability at their respective sites, accessibility to equipment, lack of operational and ICT know-how, and the human factor that emanates resistance to change for the adoption and use of new institutional systems based on technology.

“Participants also celebrated the system in its pilot offerings and the extent to which this external innovation not only presented analytical data that highlights the institutional shortcomings of the manual process, but also the lack of use in a vital area of ​​the life cycle procedure ”he added