ICL is delivering the infrastructure to schedule

2.59  Roll-out of the infrastructure started on schedule in October 2000 and by October 2002, 36 of the 42 Magistrates' Courts Committees had the new infrastructure. Roll-out is due to be completed by April 2003, with additional equipment to be provided for courtrooms between March and September 2003.

2.60  The infrastructure will be superior to what most Magistrates' Courts Committees had before. The new infrastructure provides for the first time a workstation for all staff and a national e-mail system allowing all Magistrates' Courts Committees to communicate with each other securely. On current plans, during 2003, secure e-mail to the rest of government will be provided through the Government Secure Intranet. The first three releases of enhancements which include provision of Internet access have gone live on target.

2.61  Figure 16 shows that most Magistrates' Courts Committees, which have the Libra infrastructure, consider that it is better than what they had before. Those that consider Libra to be worse had previously had up-to-date equipment and access to the Internet though they were not connected to national e-mail. The principal reasons given for Libra being better were the ability to communicate with other Magistrates' Courts Committees nationally through e-mail and access to the Internet. Magistrates' Courts Committees did, however, identify two main problems. These were:

■  Libra's current slow response times when loading or saving very large Microsoft Office files; and

■  the need to retain old software applications and equipment on their old infrastructure, which requires some staff to use two processors with a T-switch between them to a single display.

2.62  The slower response times on Microsoft Office products result from storing data at data centres (to provide resilience, back-up and disaster recovery). This means that data crosses the wide area network as opposed to just the local network, which Magistrates' Courts Committees used before Libra. To address this problem, ICL is installing local file servers. In addition Magistrates' Courts Committees are continuing to use their old infrastructure and software applications largely because the core application, which would have replaced most of those applications, has not yet been delivered. The Department with ICL has started a major programme of migrating the remaining software applications and equipment onto the Libra network. Any which cannot be migrated will remain on a stand alone basis. These actions will allow the old infrastructure to be removed.

2.63  The Department obtains feedback on the Libra service from each Magistrates' Courts Committee on a quarterly basis. This allows Magistrates' Courts Committees to state the level of importance and the performance delivered against a series of pre-defined categories. Availability and reliability are measured for the office automation service. Across the past four quarters those Magistrates' Courts Committees with Libra implemented have increased their level of satisfaction with Libra from 7.8 to 8.4. ICL follows the industry benchmark in regarding a score of below five as being "in need of urgent management action" and a score of eight and above as being "no action required". The maximum score is ten.