The team that developed the Citius computer system for Portugal’s Justice department resigned en masse in January but when doing so suggested it be a good idea that there be a month’s handover period for its members to explain the various access systems and database intricacies in an essential transfer of knowledge.
This proposal was rejected by the Financial Management and Equipment Institute of Justice (IGFEJ) which insisted the team members all left on February 4th and now seems to have no real idea how the system works.
Carlos Brito was the Citius team leader and confirms that the team was not able to leave behind any operating information for Citius which was launched on September 1st and has not worked since, leaving the country’s justice system at a standstill.
Brito said that he never produced a document on the functioning of the system, comparing this to leaving a bag containing a thousand pieces of a puzzle with no instructions.
The Union of Judicial Officers said that the computer team that left on February 4th, "shared information with court support team for the judicial district of Coimbra, where all the computers with the respective information were situated with all the servers connected." This clearly was not sufficient.
An interim report on Citius was submitted to the Ministry of Justice, delivered in June 2012, titled, ‘Planning for the reorganisation of the Judicial Map’ in which three scenarios were suggested due a need to adapt the computer system to the changes that the new judicial map would bring.
Two years earlier, a project was presented to redesign the justice information system due to constraints in the current structure.
A suggestion that the developers work closely with the Magistrates, the Supreme Judicial Council, the Superior Council of the Public Ministry or the Attorney General’s office to define the rules needed when redistributing cases was not taken up.
In an audit report released in July this year, the General Inspection of Finance warned of the cost of Citius and the need to rationalise resources.
The report also pointed out that the further payment to a foreign company of €1,195,510 (ex. VAT) on improving Citius, resulting in the Citius Plus version, "had few positive results, limited to the resolution of some safety problems."
In the light of reports on the complexity and mismanagement of the computer system development programme, the panic hiring to fix problems which was money largely wasted, the fact that the system clearly is not yet fit for purpose and the announcement that another system already is being worked on for delivery in 2017, shows management hopelessly adrift, and the Justice Minister at first trying to avoid responsibility for this expensive fiasco.
The end result, whoever is to blame, is that the country’s judicial system is at a standstill to the detriment of its citizens, and the international community looks on with a mixture of bemusement and disappointment as a judicial system that was ludicrously slow before the new computer system was introduced, and now has ground to an acrimonious halt.