Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts

Arkansas, USA
Champion since 2023

The Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts (AR-AOC) is an agency within the judicial branch of the Arkansas state government. AR-AOC provides a wide range of administrative, legal, financial, management, program, and information technology services to the state courts on behalf of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Arkansas’s legacy court software applications lacked proper integration and data flow and required manual data entry into each system to keep them coordinated. This resulted in court employees spending more time updating and maintaining records manually in multiple places. Manual errors caused the systems to contain conflicting information and stale data. The agency decided to start a modernization effort with the Court Management System (CMS), a component of their legacy systems that was used in the day-to-day activities court employees and attorneys.

Tim Holthoff, Director of Court Information Systems at the AOC said, “Instead of relying on off-the-shelf vendors who will never care as much about our courts as we do, the AOC is building a modern court management solution from the ground up. By building a cloud-native solution in AWS through cycles of continuous improvement, we can leverage state-of-the-art security and technologies to better serve the people interacting with Arkansas courts.”

Marty Sullivan, Director of the AOC, said “It is an honor for our agency to be included in the inaugural State and Local Government Champions class. We are doing exciting things at the AOC to enhance the efficiency of the Judicial Branch of government. Using technology, we will be able to offer more user-friendly, modern services that Arkansans should rightfully expect. We will be able to send text reminders to individuals reminding them of their court dates, which potentially decreases failure to appear warrants and, in turn, decreases additional fines, fees, and costs. We’ll be able to give citizens an easier mechanism to pay fees and fines online. By building our own system, the platform we create will provide a foundation that we will be able to improve upon instead of having to change systems due to obsolescence. The possibilities are endless, and the mindset of continuous improvement is a cornerstone of how the Administrative Office of the Courts will continue to operate as we move forward to better serve the public.”

AR Courts is building a new case management system on native AWS. They have so far launched the customer-facing portal, which has increased speed, agility, and dramatically improved customer experience.  The customer continues to modernize their entire ecosystem, and they have aligned their internal teams to meet the new responsibilities of working natively in the cloud. The outcome is not only a new customer facing portal, but an entirely new cloud native case management system, built and run in-house. 

The AWS Champions program recognizes, celebrates, and supports organizations and individuals driving digital transformation with cloud computing. AWS recognizes AWS Education Champions, AWS State and Local Government Champions, AWS EdTech Champions, and AWS GovTech Champions.

The purpose of the program is to acknowledge customers that have used AWS products and services in innovative ways to improve the service to their communities, constituents, customers, stakeholders, staff, students, faculty or researchers. Champions’ experiences and success stories serve as inspiration for other education, state and local government, EdTech and GovTech customers to reference as they think about their own digital transformation journey.   

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