JIS Live Webinars - Caseload Reporting is a Good Start

By Christopher Abraham, Senior Manager, IT Services, Judicial Information Services

Judicial Information Services is finishing 2018 and heading into the New Year by offering some tips and best practices for court staff who are responsible for the annual caseload reporting in January and February 2019.  

We are excited to be delivering that content in a “live webinar” format, with the ability of court stakeholders to interact with presenters and get questions answered in real time.  The streaming presentations and Q&A will also be recorded and made available, along with supporting materials, for replay (or for those unable to attend live) from the JIS support portal: https://mijis.courts.michigan.gov.

SCAO recently adopted the Zoom meeting platform (https://zoom.us/) for both group conferencing and broadcast communications like informational or instructional webinars.  Court stakeholders may expect to see this intuitive and feature-rich tool in use by JIS and other SCAO teams going forward.   Our JIS team has found it very straightforward to use in the preparation and execution of the webinars.

Because there are different case management systems and processes for each court types, JIS scheduled a series of seven specific webinar presentations spread over the first half of December to concentrate on the caseload reporting topic.  Court staff were contacted using several methods of communication to enable them to register for the appropriate session in advance.  Overall registrations reflect that more than 50 percent of courts have at least one representative attending, and nearly 200 individual court employees attended at least one of the series presentations.

This is encouraging because JIS hopes to continue this style of webinar-based broadcast and interactive communication with court staff in the future.  Part of the JIS service team’s emphasis for 2019 will be to explore and engage with stakeholders using new modes of communication and interaction.  These webinars are just the start.  We expect to learn from the Caseload Reporting webinar experience and respond to follow-up survey feedback in order to improve our next round of presentations.

Our next live webinar will be on January 16, 2019, and will continue the caseload topic to review the file upload to MCAP and the reporting components there.  You can register for that webinar here.

If you have suggestions for future topics JIS can address in the broadcast webinar format, please pass those along by adding a comment to our suggestions blog.  We would love to hear what information services topics would be the most beneficial to court staff and other stakeholders.

Christopher Abraham, Senior Manager of IT Services for JIS, directs and lead steams who are responsible for providing implementation, support services, training, documentation, and product portfolio management.  He has more than 20 years of experience in managing information technology and software development teams and processes, with a background in communications, project management, and software engineering.  He recently joined SCAO after 12 years with IDV Solutions (now Everbridge, Inc.).