Project Description

Following a competitive tender process Bridgeall were appointed by Scottish Government as the hosting, support and development supplier for the Scottish Government and Community Justice Scotland’s (CJS) offender risk assessment and case management system (also known as LS/CMI).

Previously hosted in 33 individual instances, the system was centralised and Bridgeall were tasked to migrate this centralised system from the Scottish Government’s public services network (PSN) to the public cloud in Microsoft Azure.  As well as this, Bridgeall are responsible for the ongoing support and application development of the system in-line with improvements and responding to support tickets, as well as remediating previous system bugs.

“Bridgeall were excellent during the transition of this complex service. Any issues that arose were met with a positive can do attitude and solutions and workarounds were identified at pace and with thought and intelligence. The Scottish Government greatly appreciate this culture and commitment”. – Vicki Bell, Public Protection Interventions Team Leader

About Community Justice Scotland

Community Justice Scotland (CJS) is the national body responsible for reducing re-offending. Launched in April 2017, it replaced eight separate community justice authorities. The organisation’s vision of breaking the cycle of re-offending is achieved through constant innovation and partnership, working to develop new ways of supporting offenders, their families and support agencies; reducing offending, victim numbers and introducing world-leading standards of community justice across Scotland.

Challenges facing Community Justice Scotland

The Level of Service and Case Management System, also known as the LS/CMI system, has been used in Scotland since 2010. It supports risk assessment and case management for individuals with a history of offending. The LS/CMI system is used as one part of a wider set of processes by social work and prison staff to inform a number of decision points within the criminal justice system including sentencing decisions, programme access and prison release decisions. The team wanted to move from the existing supplier to a public cloud hosted environment. There were also errors found within the existing system, which would require a remediation project to fix the bugs.

Bridgeall delivered this project in two phases. The first phase was a transition from the existing IT service provider to Bridgeall.

Transition phase

The goal of this phase was to migrate the hosting from the Scottish Government’s PSN network (now legacy) to the Microsoft Azure public cloud.  Due to the sensitive nature of the data held within the IT system, Bridgeall designed and delivered a modern and highly secure public cloud environment to host the IT system.

Bridgeall created a detailed migration plan at the start of this phase which demonstrated how a highly secure environment would be designed, built, and tested, within the timeframes given by the Scottish Government.  We also detailed how we would work with each of the 32 local authorities and the Scottish Prison Service to test and confirm secure connectivity to the new environment.

Remediation phase

Once the IT system was operational and live, the next stage was to start the planning the remediation of errors found in the application.

The goal of this phase was to remediate the errors found in the system so social workers could use the full functionality of the LS/CMI IT system. In conjunction with CJS, Bridgeall reviewed and confirmed the data impacted by the errors and put a detailed plan in place to correct the data.

The activities carried out in this phase are highlighted below:

  • Worked with the Scottish Government to identify the root cause of the system errors (and confirm that the errors did not exist in the pre-centralisation version of LS/CMI).
  • Highlighted any other areas within the system that allowed dysfunction.
  • Accurately reported the number of assessments that were impacted by the system errors.
  • Designed and implemented fixes for the system errors.
  • We went through an internal system testing phase to ensure the errors were fixed and no other major errors existed.
  • Worked with the Scottish Government, the 32 local authorities and SPS during a user acceptance testing phase to ensure the errors no longer existed and the LS/CMI IT system was fit for returning to operational use.
  • Worked with the Scottish Government to remediate all faulty data.

Since Bridgeall started working with Community Justice Scotland the team has realised the following benefits:

  • By updating the application, we have helped to support Community Justice Scotland’s objective of breaking the cycle of re-offending, allowing people to make a positive contribution to society.
  • The cloud hosting has been running successfully on Azure and this move to a more modern hosting platform means users are able to use the system successfully again.
  • Our efforts have been able to bring the application back to full functionality and stability.

Cloud migration and application development projects with Bridgeall

Bridgeall is a leading Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform partner with an experienced team of Microsoft certified Azure and cloud specialists. We help organisations understand the potential benefits of moving to the cloud, develop a plan for moving and then carry out the cloud migration in partnership with the business users.

We’re also a Microsoft Gold partner for application development and application integration. We have a large team of developers and a strong track record of delivering quality applications to meet a wide range of use cases and requirements. Whether you are looking to create a new application for your business or looking for help with your cloud migration, contact our team.