Sense and Respond

8

Create a Culture of Continuous Learning

As we discuss briefly in chapter 1, in 1996 the government of Massachusetts set out to build a new digital system linking more than one hundred courthouses across the state. Its goal was to provide a shared database of court records and documents, help court administrators track caseloads, and enable better collaboration between jurisdictions. MassCourts, as the system is known, was initially budgeted at $75 million, and most of it went to Deloitte & Touche, the primary vendor.¹ The system was originally slated to be deployed within five years and handed over to the state for ongoing maintenance and improvements. But in April 2015, the Boston Globe broke the story that nineteen years later, the project ...